Fact · Speech recognition
7.4times lower error rate
The best machine error rate on Switchboard fell from 43 percent in the 1997 review to 5.8 percent for the 2016 Microsoft system, about 7.4 times lower.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
- What it measures
- The two figures come from different systems and different Switchboard test sets, so the ratio shows the scale of the change, not an exact rate of progress.
- How it is calculated
- 43 / 5.8 = 7.4
- What it does not show
- Compares a 1997 system with a 2016 system on related but not identical tests.
Calculated from
- In a 1997 review, an HMM recognizer had a word error rate of 43 percent on the spontaneous telephone conversations of the Switchboard corpus.
- Microsoft's automated system reached word error rates of 5.8 percent on Switchboard and 11.0 percent on CallHome, slightly below the professional transcribers.