Fact · Dictation
5.9percent error rate (professional transcribers, Switchboard)
Microsoft Research reported in 2016 that its system reached human parity, and professional transcribers had a 5.9 percent error rate on the Switchboard portion.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“find that our latest automated system has reached human parity. The error rate of professional transcribers is 5.9% for the Switchboard portion of the data”
Achieving Human Parity in Conversational Speech Recognition, W. Xiong et al., arXiv (Microsoft Research), 2017, Abstract.
Open the original- What it measures
- The benchmark uses conversational telephone speech between people who know each other or are assigned a topic. The human rate was measured on this one test set.
- What it does not show
- A preprint from the team that built the system, measured on one benchmark. Parity on this set does not show parity on noisy rooms, accents or specialist vocabulary.