[News] Microsoft?s Speech Recognition Tech Achieves Human Parity--Sort Of

[StyM]

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/mic...ity,32887.html

Microsoft announced that its speech recognition technology has achieved a word error rate (WER) of only 5.9%, which the company said was similar to what human transcribers are able to achieve.

?We?ve reached human parity,? said Xuedong Huang, the company?s chief speech scientist. ?This is an historic achievement.?

Human speech recognition isn?t perfect either, which is shown by the Switchboard and CallHome benchmarks. Machine learning-based speech recognition may not yet be quite as good as humans in real world usage, but just the fact that word error rates are now similar means that speech recognition software is getting close to achieving true human parity, or even surpassing humans in speech recognition.

These latest improvements also mean that Microsoft?s own services that take advantage of speech recognition, such as Cortana, are going to become increasingly more useful and less frustrating to use. Microsoft's latest achievement, along with Google's recently announced near-human level accuracy in machine translation, synthetic speech generation that sounds almost as good as humans, and better-than-human image recognition all show that we're living in a time when machines are beginning to truly understand humans and the world around us.

[AliG]

I actually am much more excited to see how this machine learning stuff will apply to medicine.

Can you imagine how sweet it'll be if doctors could identify whether a cyst is cancerous with 97% confidence? I'm sure radiologists will push back on that (for obvious reasons), but still.