Do You Need 100% Accurate Transcripts For AI Auto-QA Or AI Insights To Be Reliable?

No. AI-based Auto QA or CX Analytics (AI Insights) do not require 100% accurate transcripts to be reliable. Modern AI derives meaning from context, patterns, and prior training—not from perfect word-for-word input—so small transcription errors don’t materially affect the quality of insights or trend detection.

TL;DR

• Contact center managers shy away from AI investments because they fear that slightly inaccurate transcripts will result in unreliable AI outputs.
• While this would be true for deterministic models (software, databases, spreadsheets), this does not apply to AI, which uses probabilistic models. 
• AI interprets meaning using patterns learned from billions of examples, so it doesn’t rely on perfect transcripts.
• Minor transcription errors behave as blips of noise, not failures, and rarely change the insight.
• AI analyzes all calls consistently, giving more reliable trends than manual QA.
• You need sufficient accuracy—not perfection—for trustworthy AutoQA and CX insights.

Introduction

On December 4th, I hosted a webinar with CMP Research to dispel four of the most persistent and detrimental myths about AI in contact centers. If you haven't watched it yet, it is now available on demand. But there is one particular misconception I want to tackle in this article because it is that important.

Recently, I was walking a potential customer through the amazing data we uncovered during a free call analysis we conducted for them. We analyzed 500 of their calls and uncovered untapped revenue opportunities, churn drivers, and more. 

It was great… until it wasn't. The mood visibly shifted when they spotted a slight inconsistency in the transcript. They sat back in their seats and crossed their arms. Within that tiny moment, they had lost complete trust in the results because they held a flawed assumption. They believed that you must have 100% accurate transcripts to get highly accurate results from the AI. 

Their fears are understandable: for the last few decades, we have worked with spreadsheets, databases, and computers programmed to function in a specific way, Garbage in, garbage out, right? If every cell in your Excel sheet isn’t correct, your final result will be wrong. So it feels intuitive that AI needs perfect input, too. The problem is that the mental model is based on classic computer programming, not on how modern AI actually works. And if we keep applying the “old” model to AI, we’ll underestimate what’s possible and overestimate the risks.

This article walks through, step by step:

1. How the “old” software model works
2. How generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are different
3. Why 90–95% transcript accuracy is usually enough for reliable Auto-QA and AI insights
4. When you do need near-perfect transcripts—and when you really don’t

You Are Used To Deterministic Software & Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO)

Classic software, such as spreadsheets, databases, or computer programs, is based on deterministic algorithms, meaning it will always produce the same output for a given input. 

• You write explicit rules: IF condition THEN result.
• You feed in exact inputs.
• The computer follows your instructions, step by step.

In that world, single errors can break everything:

• One typo in a formula returns the wrong number.
• One mis-typed product code means a row doesn’t join, so it disappears from a report.
• One extra zero in a pricing column quietly inflates a revenue number.

This is where “garbage in, garbage out” comes from. The quality of your inputs primarily determines the quality of your results. The system isn’t interpreting anything. It’s just executing rules on whatever you give it.

So we internalized a simple belief: If the input isn’t 100% accurate, you cannot trust the output. That belief is reasonable for deterministic code and structured data.

But that is just not how AI works.

How AI And LLMs Actually Work: Probabilistic, Pattern-Based, & Redundant

Modern AI (especially Large Language Models (LLMs)) doesn’t follow those same rules. It has been trained on hundreds of millions of data points and learns patterns statistically from massive amounts of text and speech. At a very high level:

• An LLM is trained on billions of words.
• It learns how words, phrases, and concepts tend to appear together.
• When you give it a transcript, it doesn’t “read” it like a human lawyer. It maps to a high-dimensional representation and reasons about patterns and context.

Two key differences from classic programming:

1. It is probabilistic, not exact. The model works with likelihoods (e.g., “In this context, this phrase probably means a billing complaint”). That makes it inherently tolerant of noise, typos, and minor mishearings.
   
   
2. It uses context, not just individual words. If one word is wrong, the rest of the sentence and conversation still provide a lot of signal. The model can often infer the intended meaning from the surrounding context.

Think of it this way:

Classic software: one wrong number can break the calculation.
AI: One wrong word is just a slightly noisy data point in a large pattern.

Humans Aren't 100% Accurate Either (And That's Okay)

For context, in legal contexts where lives and liberty can be on the line, the expectation for professional human transcribers isn’t 100%. In Pennsylvania, court reporters must hit 95% accuracy to be certified. And in speech research, “human-level” transcription is often approximated as ~4% word error rate (WER)—that’s still about 4 mistakes per 100 words.

And that's okay, because:

• Our brains fill in the gaps.
• We use context, tone, and prior knowledge.
• We can still reliably answer questions like “What was this call about?” or “Was this customer satisfied?” even if we missed a few words.

Modern AI systems do something very similar—just with statistics instead of neurons.

What Transcript Accuracy Is “Good Enough” For Call Center Transcripts?

In speech-to-text systems, transcription quality is typically measured with Word Error Rate (WER)—how many words are substituted, deleted, or inserted compared to a reference transcript. Recent benchmarks, according to Vatis Tech and FutureBeeAI, suggest:

• <5% WER → near-human performance on clean audio (dictation, audiobooks),
• 5–10% WER → very good for most business use cases, and
• 10–20% WER → still usable for meetings and many call center scenarios, especially if errors are random and not systematically biased.

Call center audio is rarely pristine: agents talk fast, customers mumble, there’s hold music, background noise, accents, and line issues. So a realistic target is often in the 90–95% accuracy range, not 100%. For context, MiaRec's proprietary AI transcription accuracy is +95%.

Also, keep in mind that your AI isn’t trying to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s trying to answer questions like:

• How often do agents fail to verify the customer’s identity?
• Which call drivers are trending up this month?
• Where in the journey does sentiment drop?

Those are aggregate questions—and that’s where statistics and the law of large numbers come in.

How AI “Fills In The Gaps” In Practice

When an LLM reads an imperfect transcript, a few things happen that make it surprisingly robust:

1. AI uses redundancy in natural language. People repeat themselves. Key information (reason for the call, resolution, next steps) usually appears multiple times, with slight variations in wording. If one instance is misheard, others are still available.
   
   
2. Some words matter much more than others. If the transcript misses a filler like “um” or mistranscribes “the” as “a,” it doesn’t change the meaning. What matters are sentiment-bearing words, intent-related phrases, and domain-specific entities. Modern models weigh these heavily.
   
   
3. Context disambiguates noise.  Even if one phrase is a bit garbled, the rest of the conversation constrains what it could plausibly mean. LLMs are built to exploit that context.
   
   
4. Training on noisy data is normal. Many speech and language models are trained on imperfect, real-world data. They “expect” noise and are optimized to find stable patterns despite it.

So a transcript that looks “messy” to a human reviewer will still make complete sense to an AI.

The Law Of The Large Numbers: Why Imperfect Transcripts Still Produce Highly Accurate And Reliable AI Insights

I want to mention something else here: Beyond the way AI infers meaning from context and prior learning, there’s a second stabilizing effect worth noting: when you analyze thousands of calls, random transcription errors tend to cancel out rather than distort the overall insight — a benefit of large numbers, not a requirement for accuracy.

The law of large numbers in statistics says that as you observe more and more samples, the average result converges to the actual underlying value. In other words, if your errors are mostly random and you look at enough data, the noise tends to cancel out, and the signal remains.

That’s the opposite of our old, spreadsheet-based intuition. In QA, we’ve historically:

• Listened manually to 2–5% of calls at best.
• Relied on human evaluators who are themselves biased, tired, and inconsistent.

AI flips that around:

• It can analyze close to 100% of calls, not 2–5%.
• It applies the same criteria consistently to every interaction.

So even with slightly noisy transcripts, your aggregate quality metrics and trends are often more reliable than traditional manual QA.

Conclusion

Remember: While perfect transcripts may feel necessary, AI doesn’t rely on flawless word-for-word input to deliver trustworthy insights. Instead, it interprets meaning using context, patterns, and knowledge learned from billions of examples—something traditional software could never do. Minor transcription errors become small, insignificant noise rather than blockers to accuracy. What truly matters is the quality of the insights, not the perfection of every word.

Want to see this in action?

We offer a free 500-call analysis so you can test how much insight AI can extract from your existing call recordings—no perfect transcripts required. Simply upload your calls, and our team will handle everything else.