Fact · Speech recognition
6.8percent word error rate
In the same IBM study, the best human transcriber reached a word error rate of 6.8 percent on the CallHome telephone test.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“achieved a surprisingly low 6.8% WER for CallHome”
English Conversational Telephone Speech Recognition by Humans and Machines, George Saon et al., arXiv (cs.CL), IBM Research, 2017, Section 2, human transcription experiments.
Open the original- What it measures
- CallHome is a set of unscripted telephone calls. In this study it was harder than Switchboard for both humans and machines.
- What it does not show
- One transcriber on one test set, after quality checking. The authors' earlier human estimate for CallHome was 11.3 percent.