Microsoft AI Now Matches Human Translators

In the latest tests, Microsoft reduced its error rate in “a series of improvements to our neural net-based acoustic and language models,” says Microsoft technical fellow Xuedong Huang in a post explaining the achievement.

This is part of a broader effort by Microsoft to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence, and bring those new approaches to market. Under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft last year formed a new 5,000-person Artificial Intelligence & Research Group as a fourth engineering division inside the company, along with the Office, Windows and cloud groups.

Microsoft says its speech recognition technology has achieved a new industry milestone, reducing its error rate to 5.1 percent, matching the error rate of multiple human transcribers in a widely recognized accuracy test.

The new result, announced this evening by the company’s Artificial Intelligence & Research Group, beats Microsoft’s previous low of 5.9 percent, reported last year; and the 5.5 percent error rate announced by IBM earlier this year.

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