Bourlard and his colleagues note that much effort over the past few years has focused on creating large-vocabulary speech recognition systems and reducing error rates measured using clean speech materials. This has led to experimental talker-independent systems with vocabularies of 65,000 words capable of transcribing sentences on a limited set of topics. Instead of comparing these systems to each other, or to last year's performance, this short comment compares them to human listeners, who are the ultimate users and judges of speech recognizers.