YITU Announces Mandarin Speech Recognition Technology

Chinese Artificial Intelligence (AI) company, YITU Technology, has unveiled a Mandarin speech recognition system, showcasing what it says is unprecedented levels of accuracy achieved by such technology thus far.

YITU’s system achieved a character error rate (CER) of 3.71% when recognizing speeches in Mandarin, 20% lower than that of current best of its kind. The results are based on the world’s largest dataset of Mandarin speech corpus, AISHELL-2. CER is a common index in speech recognition in Mandarin as the character is the most basic element in the Chinese language. It is the equivalent of word error rate in the field of English speech recognition.

YITU says its system scored the top marks under multiple scenarios in terms of accuracy, speed and the ability to transcribe when a speech is combined with both English and Chinese.