Company
Date Published
March 11, 2024
Author
Stuart Wood
Word count
1520
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Speechmatics has recently improved its speech recognition technology for Norwegian by reducing transcription errors by 40%. The company tackled challenges such as acoustic variations, diverse vocabulary, and grammatical intricacies to achieve this improvement. Key factors included addressing regional dialects across five regions in Norway and the dual written forms of Bokmål and Nynorsk. Speechmatics used three main levers for improving accuracy: model improvements, better data, and language-specific enhancements. The result is a more accurate Norwegian speech recognition system that benefits downstream tasks like summarization and translation.