Microsoft’s cortana is now just as accurate as humans

Robots are now just as good at transcribing speech as humans. According to a paper published yesterday, a team of Microsoft engineers in the Artificial Intelligence and Research division reported their system reached a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, a figure that is roughly equal to that of human abilities. “We’ve reached human parity,” said Xuedong Huang, the company’s chief speech scientist. “This is a historic achievement.” After decades of testing, the milestone comes on the heels of last month’s ‘close but no cigar’ score of 6.3 WER…

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