Fact · Speech recognition
16.39percent word error rate
In our October 2026 test on a Mac with an M2 Pro, Apple SpeechTranscriber had a word error rate of 16.39 percent on 1224 conversational utterances by speakers of all 13 accent groups together (47 speakers) from the EdAcc corpus.
Measured by us on October 21, 2026, from 1224 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 recordings are English conversations over video calls between people with different accents (EdAcc, University of Edinburgh, 2023), not read sentences, so error rates run higher than on our read-speech benchmark. The utterances were picked by a fixed rule before any engine ran: at least five words, 1.5 to 30 seconds, no overlapping speech, up to 100 per accent group spread across its speakers.
- How it is measured
- Word error rate = 4,519 word errors / 27,567 reference words = 16.39 percent, over 1224 utterances; hesitation fillers are left out of both texts and ok counts as okay, for every engine alike.
- What it does not show
- 47 speakers stand for all groups, so one speaker's voice, microphone and topic weigh heavily: compare engines within a group more than groups with each other. Numbers spoken as words in the reference count as errors when an engine writes digits.
In the data
A row of Speech Recognition and Accents: 13 English Accents Tested, as Apple SpeechTranscriber, All 13 groups: 16.39 percent.
- Engine
- Apple SpeechTranscriber
- Maker
- Apple
- Accent group
- All 13 groups
- Kind of accent
- All
- Speakers
- 47
- Utterances
- 1224