Fact · Languages and accents
24percent
In a 2026 test of YouTube's automatic Spanish captions, Argentinian Spanish had the highest overall word error rate of the dialects tested, at 24 percent.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“Argentinian Spanish yields the highest overall WER at 24%”
Dialect and Gender Bias in YouTube's Spanish Captioning System, Iris Dania Jimenez and Christoph Kern, arXiv (Computation and Language, cs.CL), preprint 2602.24002, 2026, Results (Table 3 discussion), PDF body.
Open the original- What it measures
- The authors ran YouTube's automatic captions on recordings of seven Latin American dialects, split by speaker gender, and scored them with word error rate. The 24 percent is for Argentinian speakers overall.
- What it does not show
- This measures YouTube's caption system, not on-device dictation, and it is one system tested in 2026. Each dialect came from a different dataset, so the figures compare recordings as well as dialects. The study covers Latin American Spanish only.