What is WER?
Word Error Rate — the standard accuracy metric for speech recognition. Lower is better.
WER is calculated by comparing the system's output against the reference transcript word by word, counting substitutions, deletions and insertions, then dividing that total by the word count.
One caution when buying: the WER a supplier quotes is usually measured on their own test set. To judge the data, ask under what conditions it was measured.
Related terms
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ASR
Automatic Speech Recognition — the task of turning recorded speech into text.
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Transcription
Writing down what is said in a recording. It is the core annotation task in any speech dataset.
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Full glossary
Every term we explain, in one list.
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Where these terms actually show up, and which ones change a quote.
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