IBM has announced that it has achieved the lowest word error rate in speech recognition, at 5.5%, beating Microsoft which managed 5.9% a few months back. This is still not equivalent to human parity.
Back in September 2016, Microsoft stated that it had achieved the lowest word error rate (WER) in speech recognition , at 6.3%. Prior to that, IBM held that record at 6.9%. A couple of months later, Microsoft once again announced that it had further improved its WER, which was now at 5.9%. The company believed this to be equivalent to human parity.
Now, a few months after the aforementioned claim, IBM has struck back with a WER of 5.5%, which it says is almost on par with humans.
