The error rate for human transcription can be as high as 5%.

I did transcription for a while in 2021. It is absurdly hard. Especially as these days humans only get the difficult jobs that AI has already taken a stab at.

The hardest one I did was for a sports network where it was a motorcross motorbike event where most of what you could hear was the roar of the bikes. There were two commentators I had to transcribe over the top of that mess and they were using the slang insider nicknames for all the riders, not their published names, so I had to sit and Google forums to find the names of the riders while I was listening. I'm not even sure how these local models would even be able to handle that insanity at all because they almost certainly lack enough domain knowledge.

Oh wow, I thought humans are like 0.1% error rate, if they are native speakers and aware of the subject being discussed.

I was skepitcal upon hearing the figure but various sources do indeed back it up and [0] is a pretty interesting paper (old but still relevant human transcibers haven't changed in accuracy).

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

I think it's actually hard to verify how correct a transcription is, at scale. Curious where those error rate numbers come from, because they should test it on people actually doing their job.

It can depend a lot on different factors like:

- familiarity with the accent and/or speaker;

- speed and style/cadence of the speech;

- any other audio that is happening that can muffle or distort the audio;

- etc.

It can also take multiple passes to get a decent transcription.

You missed a giant factor: domain knowledge. Transcribing something outside of your knowledge realm is very hard. I posted above about transcribing the commentary of a motorbike race where the commentators only used the slang names of the riders.