Fact · Speech recognition
5.8percent word error rate
Microsoft's automated system reached word error rates of 5.8 percent on Switchboard and 11.0 percent on CallHome, slightly below the professional transcribers.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“our automated system establishes a new state of the art, and edges past the human benchmark, achieving error rates of 5.8% and 11.0%, respectively”
Achieving Human Parity in Conversational Speech Recognition, W. Xiong et al., arXiv (Microsoft Research), 2017, Abstract.
Open the original- What it measures
- Often cited as the point where machine recognition matched professional transcribers on conversational speech.
- What it does not show
- A research system tuned to this benchmark, not a consumer dictation product.
Source
Used to calculate
Cited on
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