That article is correct that WER has some problems, but it also correctly concludes that "Even WER’s critics begrudgingly admit its supremacy." Yes, Switchboar

That article is correct that WER has some problems, but it also correctly concludes that "Even WER’s critics begrudgingly admit its supremacy." Yes, Switchboard has problems (I've mentioned many of them here) but it was something that 1990s systems could be tuned for. You would see even more dramatic improvements when using newer test sets. A speech recognition system from the 1990s will fall flat on its face when transcribing (say) a set of modern YouTube searches. Most systems in those days also didn't even make a real attempt at speaker-independence, which makes the the problem vastly easier. Executives don't dictate as much any more because most of them learned to touch type.