This milestone means that, for the first time, a computer can recognise the words in a conversation as well as a person would.
"Our research team reached that 5.1 percent error rate with our speech recognition system, a new industry milestone, substantially surpassing the accuracy we achieved last year," Microsoft said in a blog post late on Sunday.
Last year in October, the team from Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists.
The researchers had then reported a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent.
"Last year, Microsoft's speech and dialog research group announced a milestone in reaching human parity on the 'Switchboard' conversational speech recognition task, meaning we had created technology that recognised words in a conversation as well as professional human transcribers," said Xuedong Huang, Technical Fellow, Microsoft.
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