Fact · Speech recognition
7.15percent word error rate
In our October 2026 test on a Mac with an M2 Pro, Apple SpeechTranscriber had a word error rate of 7.15 percent on 100 English FLEURS recordings cut to 8 kHz audio without any codec, which removes every sound above 4 kHz.
Measured by us on October 22, 2026, from 100 recordings
Our own measurement
This number comes from our benchmark, not from another publication. The full record (the setup, every recording's checksum, every transcript and timing) is published, so you can recompute it.
- What it measures
- Apple's on-device speech model in macOS 26 (SpeechAnalyzer with a SpeechTranscriber module, transcription preset), with the locale given (en-US, de-DE, fr-FR, es-MX, it-IT, pt-BR). The same 100 English recordings in every condition, so the conditions differ only in the audio path.
- How it is measured
- Word error rate = 153 word errors / 2,141 reference words = 7.15 percent. Every recording was brought to the same speech level (-26 dB below full scale) and, for this condition, encoded and decoded in software exactly as described in the run record.
- What it does not show
- Compared with the original recording, this engine's word error rate changed by +0.75 points. Over the 100 recordings, the 95% interval for that change, allowing for the test's nine comparisons, is -0.28 to +1.85 points, which includes zero, so this test cannot tell the change apart from chance and does not count it as a measured loss or gain. The codecs are run in software on studio-clean read speech. A real headset adds its own microphone, noise suppression and radio losses, which this test leaves out, so compare conditions and engines rather than this number with a headset in a room.
In the data
A row of Bluetooth Headset Dictation Accuracy, Tested, as Apple SpeechTranscriber, 8 kHz, no codec: 7.15 percent.
- Engine
- Apple SpeechTranscriber
- Maker
- Apple
- Audio path
- 8 kHz, no codec
- Language
- English