Fact · Languages and accents
18percent
In a 2026 test of YouTube's automatic Spanish captions, Mexican Spanish had an overall word error rate of 18 percent.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“Mexican Spanish exhibit an overall WER value of 18%”
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 and scored them with word error rate. The Mexican recordings came from a different corpus than the other dialects.
- What it does not show
- This measures YouTube's caption system, not on-device dictation. The Mexican recordings came from a different dataset than the other dialects, so the figure is not a like-for-like comparison with them.