>> Judging by my everyday interactions, a 6% error rate is lower than human error rates in casual conversation.
It's better to avoid throwing around numbers like that but even if that was the case you have to remember that humans understand speech. The speech recognition task performed by AI systems on the other hand is more akin to transliteration: the system takes in sound as input and produces text as output. Any sort of "understanding" a) is extremly difficult to do well and b) must be performed by a different component of the system (a different algorithm, trained on different data).
It's better to avoid throwing around numbers like that but even if that was the case you have to remember that humans understand speech. The speech recognition task performed by AI systems on the other hand is more akin to transliteration: the system takes in sound as input and produces text as output. Any sort of "understanding" a) is extremly difficult to do well and b) must be performed by a different component of the system (a different algorithm, trained on different data).