Metrics
What is Word error rate (WER)?
Word error rate (WER) is the standard accuracy measure for speech recognition: the number of substituted, deleted and inserted words divided by the number of words actually spoken.
Also called: WER, ASR accuracy
Lower is better, and a WER of 0.1 means roughly one word in ten is wrong. Published figures are usually measured on benchmark datasets of clean, read speech; real phone calls with narrowband audio, background noise and code-switching score considerably worse. Code-switched speech also raises a scoring question, since 'booking' may be transcribed in Latin or Devanagari script, and a strict WER counts the difference as an error.
Not all errors are equal. Missing a filler word is harmless, while hearing 'pandrah' (15) as 'pachaas' (50) changes a budget and everything decided after it. When evaluating any voice agent, test it on recordings of real customer calls and check the words that matter, namely names, numbers, dates and localities, rather than relying on a headline WER.
What is Word error rate (WER)?
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Word error rate (WER) is the standard accuracy measure for speech recognition: the number of substituted, deleted and inserted words divided by the number of words actually spoken. Lower is better, and a WER of 0.1 means roughly one word in ten is wrong. Published figures are usually measured on benchmark datasets of clean, read speech; real phone calls with narrowband audio, background noise and code-switching score considerably worse. Code-switched speech also raises a scoring question, since 'booking' may be transcribed in Latin or Devanagari script, and a strict WER counts the difference as an error.
Why does Word error rate (WER) matter?
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Not all errors are equal. Missing a filler word is harmless, while hearing 'pandrah' (15) as 'pachaas' (50) changes a budget and everything decided after it. When evaluating any voice agent, test it on recordings of real customer calls and check the words that matter, namely names, numbers, dates and localities, rather than relying on a headline WER.
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