Microsoft published a research paper on October 17 wherein a team of researchers and engineers of the company's Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than humans who professionally transcript files do.
The researchers reported a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 per cent. With this accomplishment, computers can now recognize the words in a conversation as well as a person would. This technology will have broad implications for consumer and business products such as Xbox, instant speech-to-text transcription and Cortana among other products. The Microsoft team made use of a homegrown system for deep learning to reach this milestone. The company is now working on ways to make sure that the speech recognition works well in real-life settings that include additional external factors such as background noise.
