The only trick I can see being played is that Google was benchmarked on September 2020, so likely has already improved and they don't want to show that. Is CommonVoice a better standard to use when comparing these tools?
The only trick I can see being played is that Google was benchmarked on September 2020, so likely has already improved and they don't want to show that. Is CommonVoice a better standard to use when comparing these tools?
LibriSpeech, on the other hand, is audiobooks read in a silent setting with a good microphone. And some speakers are even professional narrators. So that's the dataset to compare for for an office worker using it for dictation with high-quality equipment.
Also, Google is kinda famous for having the worst speech recognition of the enterprise offerings. (Microsoft's Azure STT has roughly half the error rate) Plus they tested Google's old model.
But the main point I'm trying to make is that even if it is "as good as Google", that a 20% word error rate is still pretty much unusable in practice.
I see your point, although "as good as Google" qualifies as "enterprise-level" in my book.
Not in my experience. I tested basically all commercial speech recognition APIs a number of years ago and Google was significantly ahead of everyone else.
It was some time ago and I haven't tested since, but my casual use of speech recognition systems (e.g. via Alexa or Google Assistant) suggests that it's only gotten better since then.