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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.

Most of these errors will not be meaningful. Real speech is full of ambiguities. 3% is low