Question
What Is Word Error Rate?
What it does, and how to check it yourself.
Word error rate, or WER, is the share of words a transcript gets wrong, leaves out or adds, compared with a correct transcript. A lower number is better. You work it out by adding those errors and dividing by the words in the correct text.
Checked November 2026 on each tool's own site. We ran no tests of our own.
Can you give an example?
If a correct text has 100 words, and the transcript has 3 wrong, 1 missing and 1 extra, the WER is 5 in 100, or 5%.