A Comparison of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Systems

Back in March 2016 I wrote Semi-automated podcast transcription about my interest in finding ways to make archives of podcast content more accessible. Please read that post for details of my motivations and goals.

Some 11 months later, in February 2017, I wrote Comparing Transcriptions describing how I was exploring measuring transcription accuracy. That turned out to be more tricky, and interesting, than I’d expected. Please read that post for details of the methods I’m using and what the WER (word error rate) score means.

Here, after another over-long gap, I’m returning to post the current results, and start thinking about next steps. One cause of the delay has been that whenever I returned to the topic there had been significant changes in at least one of the results, most recently when Google announced their enhanced models. In the end the delay turned out to be helpful.

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