Speech recognition software isn't perfect, but it is a little closer to human this week, as a Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research team reached a major milestone in speech-to-text development: The system reached a historically low word error rate of 5.9 percent, equal to the accuracy of a professional (human) transcriptionist. The system can discern words as clearly and accurately as two people having a conversation might understand one another.

By combining Microsoft's open-source Computational Network Toolkit, and being a little bit over-obsessed with this project, the team was able to beat its goal of human parity by years in just months, according to Microsoft's blog. They hit the parity milestone around 3:30 a.m., when Xuedong Huang, the company's chief speech scientist, woke up to the breakthrough.