Notes

Occasional longer pieces: where things came from, and what was learned along the way.

• October 3, 2026 The story behind cpWER

  Long-form, multi-speaker conversational ASR is everywhere right now: meeting transcription, podcasts, multi-talker speech foundation models, and now open releases from big companies such as Microsoft’s VibeVoice-ASR and NVIDIA’s multi-talker Parakeet with Sortformer diarization. Many of the papers in this area report a number called cpWER, and every time I see it, I am a little happy.