Nikki Haley is the best politician in the U.S. according to this rating

Nikki Haley is the best politician in America.

That’s what one service said about the former South Carolina Governor who is currently the United States’ Ambassador to the United Nations.

It wasn’t ranking Haley on her accomplishments, or legislative success, or even her approval rating. Haley was ranked No. 1 among U.S. politicians for her speech.

Which one? Was it to the General Assembly of the U.N., or her take down of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, or possibly her impassioned plea to remove the Confederate flag from the S.C. Statehouse grounds?

Nope, none of the above.

This service was comparing the eloquence of top U.S. politicians, using clear enunciation, slow speech, simple words as measuring sticks. And Haley’s speaking was rated the best.

The tests were conducted by Trint, an online software platform, which has been called an “unprecedented voice transcription technology” by Wired.

Who are the people Trint has passing down judgment on the speaking quality of Haley and other politicians? Actually, no people at all.

Trint used artificial intelligence to generate transcripts of recorded audio and video, to evaluate which politicians the bots understand best.

Just to show that these aren’t the types of bots allegedly used by Russia to meddle in elections around the world, the politicians ranking second and third behind Haley are ideologically as far away as another U.S. politician could be from the Lexington Republican.

Haley was followed by Hillary Clinton and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). Among the politicians scoring the lowest, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was at the bottom, behind John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex).

President Donald Trump came in at No. 11 and former President Barack Obama was 8^th.

According to Trint, politicians who need to get their message across to a broad audience succeed by using simple language, repetition and brevity.

Trint used Word Error Rate to measure the number of substituted, deleted, and inserted words to produce a rate of inaccuracy. A transcript with a WER of 5.5 is 5.5 percent inaccurate or, conversely, 94.5 percent accurate.

Haley’s score was close to perfect. The former S.C. Governor had a 99.48 percent accurate transcript (.52 WER). She scored that high despite having a light Southern accent.

In addition to accents, other factors that pose challenges to bots are swallowing of prefixes and suffixes, and specialized words like names of organizations or people.

“Whether talking to an automated customer service agent, Siri, or Alexa, most people know firsthand that bots often misunderstand the human voice,” Trint CEO and Founder Jeff Kofman said in a news release.

Think about it, how often have you argued with Siri or Alexa about what you said vs. how it was interpreted?

At times President Donald Trump (97.89) swallows prefixes and suffixes and sometimes turns away from the microphone, but like former President Barack Obama (98.47) his slow delivery works well with automated speech-to-text, says Kofman.

“Even those politicians with the lowest scores had very high accuracy rates, revealing just how good automated speech recognition has become,” said Kofman.

So when a politician tells you to “Read my lips,” Trint’s bots already have that taken care of. The accuracy of their speech is a different issue all together.

This story was originally published November 21, 2017 at 10:13 PM with the headline "Nikki Haley is the best politician in the U.S. according to this rating."