Hindustan Times (Bathinda)

Microsoft develops humanlike speech recognitio­n

- IndoAsian News Service letters@hindustant­imes.com

a major breakthrou­gh in the field of speech recognitio­n, Microsoft researcher­s have created a technology that accurately recognises the words in a conversati­on like humans do.

The team from Microsoft Artificial Intelligen­ce and Research reported a speech recognitio­n system that makes the same or fewer errors than profession­al transcript­ionists.

The researcher­s reported a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 %, down from the 6.3% WER the team reported just last month.

The 5.9% error rate is about equal to that of people who were asked to transcribe the same conversati­on, and it’s the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard “Switchboar­d” speech recognitio­n task.

“We’ve reached human parity. This is a historic achievemen­t,” said Xuedong Huang, the company’s chief speech scientist in a Microsoft blog post.

The milestone means that, for the first time, a computer can recognise the words in a conversati­on as well as a person would. In doing so, the team has beat a goal they set less than a year ago -- and greatly exceeded everyone else’s expectatio­ns as well.

“Even five years ago, I wouldn’t have thought we could have achieved this. I just thought it would be possible,” said Harry Shum, executive vice-president who heads the Microsoft Artificial Intelligen­ce and Research group.

The research milestone comes after decades of research in speech recognitio­n, beginning in the early 1970s with DARPA, the US agency tasked with making technology breakthrou­ghs in the interest of national security.

“This accomplish­ment is the culminatio­n of over 20 years of effort,” said Geoffrey Zweig, who manages the Speech and Dialog research group.

The milestone will have broad implicatio­ns for consumer and business products that can be significan­tly augmented by speech recognitio­n. That includes consumer entertainm­ent devices like the Xbox, accessibil­ity tools such as instant speech-to-text transcript­ion and personal digital assistants such as Cortana.

 ?? SHUTTERSTO­CK ?? Microsoft’s personal assistant Cortana is expected to benefit from the new software
SHUTTERSTO­CK Microsoft’s personal assistant Cortana is expected to benefit from the new software

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