Microsoft Hits a Speech Recognition Milestone

One of the biggest problems facing voice assistants like Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Echo, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) Siri, and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Cortana is their struggles with conversational speech recognition. It's one thing to slowly speak into your phone, device, or computer to ask something simple. Speaking conversationally as you normally do and having your artificial intelligence (AI) voice assistant help is something entirely different.

Microsoft has been one of the companies trying to improve the language ability of AI-powered devices. Last year, it was able to achieve the same error rate as human transcribers using a standard test known as Switchboard. Now the company has further improved its speech recognition, equaling an even tougher method of being compared with professional transcribers.

Microsoft has its Cortana voice assistant installed on its Windows 10 devices. Image source: Microsoft.

Source: Fool.com