Fact · Dictation
8.12percent word error rate
In a preliminary Wall Street Journal recognition task, wideband (16 kHz) speech gave a word error rate of 8.12% with the same recognizer architecture.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“wideband speech, with a word error rate (WER) of 8.12%, can always outperform narrowband speech, with a WER of 8.67%”
DNN-based speech bandwidth expansion and its application to adding high-frequency missing features for automatic speech recognition of narrowband speech, Kehuang Li et al., Interspeech 2015, International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), 2015, Introduction, paragraph 2.
Open the original- What it measures
- The authors compared the same recognizer on wideband and narrowband versions of the same read speech. The result is a preliminary experiment on the 20,000-word open-vocabulary Wall Street Journal task.
- What it does not show
- Clean read speech in a 2015 recognizer. It does not measure noisy rooms or telephone calls, so it shows the direction of the effect, not its size in dictation.