Character error rate (CER)

Character error rate (CER) measures speech-recognition accuracy at the character level rather than the word level, and is the standard metric for languages without spaces between words, such as Chinese, Japanese and Thai.

For languages where 'word' is ambiguous, counting character edits gives a more stable measure than WER. For alphabetic languages CER is also useful to distinguish near-misses (one wrong letter) from total misses (a different word entirely).

Related terms