Microsoft announces that its speech recognition technology reduces its error rate and is as effective as humans

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It is one of the pillars on which many affirm that the different platforms will grow in the immediate future. Nothing to interact with written commands or gestures. The future lies in talking to machines but no talking with robotic commands and unnatural orders. We will do it with a natural language, something that we appreciate more and more clearly in personal assistants."

And one of the firms that has a most notable career in this sense is Microsoft, a company that has a development path in which it works to constantly improve employee voice recognition then on their platforms.A technology that we now have news about from the development team, news that talks about a great improvement that places it at the same level of precision as that used among humans

In this sense they have announced that their voice recognition system has reached 5.1% in WER, that is , the error in the rate of the word used. For many this may not say anything, but it is surprising if we see how on the one hand this rate is the same as the one we find in communication between people

To do this, from Redmond they have chosen to make use of improved models of verbal and acoustic language based on the use of neural networks These are They are combined with long-term bidirectional memory so that acoustic modeling is improved, thus improving recognition thanks to a prediction of the words that can be used based on a communication history.These improvements also have the support of the cloud thanks to the effort that the company has made to improve the cloud computing infrastructure, especially with Azure.

In addition, this has meant that this error rate has been lowered in terms of the margin of failure, since before it was at 5.9%, thus falling from 12%, which was the figure that the system had less than a year ago. Therefore, Microsoft has achieved a speech recognition system as effective as that of humans and seeing the progression they are taking, it is not surprising that they will even improve it in the coming months or years.

Who knows if in a few years from now talking to our Windows PC, interacting with Cortana, or applications like Office, will be something as natural as what they have already made us dream (or have nightmares, who knows) in the cinema.

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