Fact · Languages and accents
61percent word error rate
On the 1996/97 NIST CallHome task for Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, the best word error rate obtained was 61 percent.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“The best performance obtained in those evaluations was 61% word error rate (WER)”
Novel approaches to Arabic speech recognition, Katrin Kirchhoff et al., IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, 2003, Section 1.
Open the original- What it measures
- CallHome is a corpus of unscripted telephone calls between family and friends. The paper compares it with far lower error on formal Arabic broadcast speech.
- What it does not show
- Very old systems, so the number is a historical marker. It shows that dialect, not script, was the hard part.