word error rate (WER) measures: edit distance between predicted and reference transcriptions

Ever wondered how machines understand speech as we do?

Imagine you're asking your smart assistant to play your favorite song, but it keeps asking for the song's lyrics instead.

The assistant struggles because it can't match spoken words to its stored lyrics perfectly. The WER metric helps us understand how well it gets this right or wrong.

Example

If you asked for "Bohemian Rhapsody" and the assistant said "Bohemian Rhapsody lyrics," there's a mismatch.

Remember this

WER measures the assistant's accuracy in recognizing your spoken words.

Text adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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