Fact · Speech recognition
The jiwer Python package computes its speech measures, including WER, from the minimum edit distance between the reference and the hypothesis sentences.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“These measures are computed with the use of the minimum-edit distance between one or more reference and hypothesis sentences”
jiwer: Evaluate your speech-to-text system (README), Jitsi open source project, GitHub, jitsi/jiwer, n.d., README, introduction.
Open the original- What it measures
- jiwer is a widely used open-source Python package for evaluating speech-to-text output.
- What it does not show
- The README describes the method. Check the package version, since its internal implementation has changed over time.