Microsoft’s Speech Recognition System Reached ‘Human Parity’.

Microsoft claims that the company has developed a voice recognition system that can understand the human speech as good as a human himself. The parity between technology and humans is a major breakthrough in the tech world.

Computer science has come a long way lately and this milestone means that a computer will now understand the words of a conversation like an actual person. The technical team started this research in 2015 which means that they took only a single ear to achieve this next to impossible target.

Speech parity does not mean that the responses from the mechanism will be perfect but will surely come at par with the human counterparts, said a Microsoft Official.

He also stated that the error rate in speech recognition was 5.9 percent with was almost equal to the errors found in a transcript written by a human for the same speech. The 5.9% error rate is the lowest rate ever recorded in the speech recognition history, the previous one being 6.3% recorded in September.

The goal to achieve human parity in a speech recognition system was set in the 1970’s by DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Project Agency) but was not able to achieve its target and the computer industry took over the dream of achieving the impossible.

The Executive Vice President of the Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research group said that the goal was still a far cry dream 5 years ago and he never thought that it would be possible to invent something like this in this century.

Microsoft does not want to stop here and has started working on modifying the system to work in noisy situations, so that, similar results can be obtained while using the software in real life situations with much broader selection of voices.

This advancement in the speech recognition system will act as a huge advantage for the socio-economic structure all over the world. The user experience will drastically improve in the entertainment options like Xbox or surfing the internet, while on the other hand, the system can become the most preferred speech into text converter in various business organisations.

Microsoft’s Cortana will benefit the most from this new advancement and would be able to compete aggressively with the other Assistants in the market. 

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19 October 2016
Rohan Jaitly