Microsoft achieves a historic milestone in Speech Recognition

Microsoft researchers have claimed to have created a new speech recognition technology which is very close to human in terms of transcribing conversational speech.

Microsoft researchers from the Speech & Dialog research group Image credits- Allison Linn

According to Microsoft, They have achieved a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, which is about equal to human transcribers. 

This has improved from the previous record of 6.3 percent WER.

"We've reached human parity. This is a historic achievement," Xuedong Huang, the company's chief speech scientist said in a blog post.

There have been decades of research in speech recognition being done since early 1970s with DARPA which is a US agency which works on making technology brekthroughs.

 Geoffrey Zweig, who is the Partner Research Manager at Microsoft was quoted as saying, "This accomplishment is the culmination of over twenty years of effort,"

This is something which will enhance and give strenght to Cortana-an intelligent personal assistant created by Microsoft for Windows.

Something the developers might find interesting is that Microsoft’s Computational Network Toolkit, a homegrown system for deep learning that the research team has also made available on GitHub via an open source license.