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Microsoft’s major breakthrough in speech recognition technology

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Speech recognition is a big part of tech industry’s current bet on machine learning and artificial intelligence. And Microsoft claims to have made a major breakthrough in the area having created technology that recognizes the words in a conversation as well as humans do.

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Researchers at Microsoft published findings about a new speech recognition technology on Monday that they say transcribes conversational speech as well as a human does. "We've reached human parity," says Microsoft's chief speech scientist Xuedong Huang in a statement. "This is an historic achievement."

CIOL Microsoft’s major breakthrough in speech recognition technology

The word error rate of the system was down to 5.9 percent, from the 6.3 percent error rate reported just last month. The 5.9 percent error rate is about equal to that of people who were asked to transcribe the same conversation, and it is the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task.

The technology uses neural language models that group similar words together, allowing for efficient generalization. Microsoft plans to use the technology in Cortana, its personal voice assistant for Windows and the Xbox One, as well as speech-to-text transcription software.

"This will make Cortana more powerful, making a truly intelligent assistant possible," said Harry Shum, the executive vice president of the Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research group.