Microsofts conversational speech recognition system\u2014designed to accurately recognises the words in a conversation like humans do\u2014has reached a 5.1 per cent error rate, its lowest so far.This milestone means that, for the first time, a computer can recognise the words in a conversation as well as a person would.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur research team reached that 5.1 per cent error rate with our speech recognition system, a new industry milestone, substantially surpassing the accuracy we achieved last year,\u201d Microsoft said in a blog post late on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Last year in October, the team from Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists.<\/p>\n
The researchers had then reported a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 per cent.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast year, Microsoft\u2019s speech and dialog research group announced a milestone in reaching human parity on the \u2018Switchboard\u2019 conversational speech recognition task, meaning we had created technology that recognised words in a conversation as well as professional human transcribers,\u201d said Xuedong Huang, Technical Fellow, Microsoft.<\/p>\n
\u2018Switchboard\u2019 is a corpus of recorded telephone conversations that the speech research community has used for more than 20 years to benchmark speech recognition systems.<\/p>\n
The task involves transcribing conversations between strangers discussing topics such as sports and politics.<\/p>\n
The team used \u201cMicrosoft Cognitive Toolkit 2.1\u201d (CNTK), the most scalable deep learning software available, for exploring model architectures.<\/p>\n
Additionally, Microsoft\u2019s investment in cloud compute infrastructure, specifically Azure GPUs, helped improve the effectiveness and speed.<\/p>\n
Reaching human parity with an accuracy on par with humans has been a research goal for the last 25 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cMicrosoft\u2019s willingness to invest in long-term research is now paying dividends for our customers in products and services such as Cortana, Presentation Translator, and Microsoft Cognitive Services,\u201d the post read.<\/p>\n
\u201cMoving from recognising to understanding speech is the next major frontier for speech technology,\u201d the post added.<\/p>\n
IANS<\/p>\n
Picture courtesy: Alamy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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