Fact · Dictation
0.35word error rate
Across five commercial ASR systems, the average word error rate was 0.35 for Black speakers and 0.19 for white speakers.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“with an average word error rate (WER) of 0.35 for black speakers compared with 0.19 for white speakers”
Racial disparities in automated speech recognition, Allison Koenecke et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020, Abstract.
Open the original (DOI 10.1073/pnas.1915768117)- What it measures
- The corpus is 19.8 hours of structured interviews matched on speaker age and gender.
- What it does not show
- Interview speech, 2020 systems. The gap is an average across systems, and the study does not test dictation apps.
Source
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