Fact · Accessibility and health
29.38percent word error rate
A 2019 speech recognition system for children aged 6 to 9 with autism or language impairment reached a word error rate of 29.38 percent in its best configuration.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“Our best configuration yields a 29.38% word error rate (WER).”
Improving ASR Systems for Children with Autism and Language Impairment Using Domain-Focused DNN Transfer Techniques, Robert Gale et al., Interspeech 2019, ISCA Archive, 2019, Abstract.
Open the original- What it measures
- The children repeated sentences in a standard clinical speaking task. Word error rate counts substitutions, deletions and insertions as a share of the words spoken.
- What it does not show
- The task is structured sentence repetition, not everyday conversation, and the children were aged 6 to 9. The figure is not comparable with word error rates for typical adult speech, and no autistic adults were tested.