Fact · Accessibility and health
10percent word error rate
In a 2019 Google study, personalized models brought word error rate on ALS speech down to 10 percent for mild dysarthria and 20 percent for more serious dysarthria.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“down to 10% for mild dysarthria and 20% for more serious dysarthria”
Personalizing ASR for Dysarthric and Accented Speech with Limited Data, Joel Shor et al., Interspeech 2019, 2019, Abstract.
Open the original- What it measures
- The test set was a set of message bank phrases, read by people with ALS. The paper evaluates only people rated FRS 3 or below on the ALS Functional Rating Scale, which is 17 speakers and 22.1 hours of audio.
- What it does not show
- Read phrases from a restricted vocabulary, not free conversation. The 10 percent figure is for mild dysarthria and the 20 percent figure for more serious dysarthria, so the two cannot be read as one average.