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A Baidu voice recognition program has outclassed humans that were typing using smartphone on-screen keyboards:
Computers have already beaten us at chess, Jeopardy and Go, the ancient board game from Asia. And now, in the raging war with machines, human beings have lost yet another battle — over typing. Turns out voice recognition software has improved to the point where it is significantly faster and more accurate at producing text on a mobile device than we are at typing on its keyboard. That's according to a new study by Stanford University, the University of Washington and Baidu, the Chinese Internet giant. The study ran tests in English and Mandarin Chinese.
Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng says this should not feel like defeat. "Humanity was never designed to communicate by using our fingers to poke at a tiny little keyboard on a mobile phone. Speech has always been a much more natural way for humans to communicate with each other," he says.
Researchers set up a competition, pitting a Baidu program called Deep Speech 2 against 32 humans, ages 19 to 32. The humans took turns saying and then typing short phrases into an iPhone — like "buckle up for safety" and "wear a crown with many jewels" and "this person is a disaster." They found the voice recognition software was three times faster.
Speech Is 3x Faster than Typing for English and Mandarin Text Entry on Mobile Devices (abstract) and full paper (pdf).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @12:20AM
...whilst the notion of having a keyboard has been abandoned.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @12:28AM
First they came for the keyboard, and I did not speak out, because touch screen.
Then they came for the memory card slot, and I did not speak out, because cloud.
Then they came for the headphone jack—and no one could speak with me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @03:41AM
First they came for the keyboard, and I did not speak out, because touch screen.
Then they came for the memory card slot, and I did not speak out, because cloud.
Then they came for the headphone jack—and no one could hear me speak.
FTFY
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Friday August 26 2016, @12:30AM
I'm waiting for the follow-up study, Baidu vs. Full QWERTY and Dvorak.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @12:45AM
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_iPad_Event03.jpg [wikimedia.org]
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday August 26 2016, @01:50AM
QWERTY and Dvorak weren't designed for entering Chinese characters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @02:02AM
Why can't those barbarians just learn American like the ruling class of the world elite? The gutteral ping-ponging of their local barbarian speech has no place on computers.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 26 2016, @02:08AM
The study involved English. The study found that voice recognition was 3.0x faster than English hand input, and 2.8x faster than Mandarin Chinese.
English-speaking users are interested in the performance with respect to the Latin alphabet, not Chinese characters. So my point (or was it a joke?) still stands.
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(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday August 26 2016, @04:07AM
From the Technology Review article:
Voice queries are more popular in China because it is more time-consuming to input text, and because some people do not know how to use Pinyin, the phonetic system for transcribing Mandarin using Latin characters.
I would suppose that this voice recognition system will show its greatest speed and accuracy advantages among people who don't know how to do Pinyin input. Baidu's Mandarin-speaking users (if any) are rather fortunate that the company thought of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @07:19AM
Is it faster than entering stuff via stuff like Swiftkey? Since it's only 3X faster than "tapping" on a keyboard I think it's slower.
It's a matter of whether you want Swiftkey to know your passwords or you prefer some cloud service to know your passwords (lots of this "free" voice recognition stuff have things done at servers).
I've disabled network access for Swiftkey on my phone (and it works fine- maybe even faster since it doesn't have to send all my stuff to the CIA/NSA, I had problems with Swype lagging a lot presumably sending my data was taking too long :) ). While in theory smartphones could do the voice recognition (and lots of other stuff) themselves, most apps and services prefer to put all that juicy data where they can access it (and presumably make money from it).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @12:31AM
...and while an expert at Morse code with a fast key beat some texting champions, nearly every one has forgotten that too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @12:38AM
Obviously. Morse keying requires less muscle movement. It's a twich game.
What everyone conveniently forgot is how shocked the stupid kids were when they lost to old people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @01:58AM
Were they texting from a full physical keyboard, or from a 12-key pad or a touchscreen?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @07:24AM
p.s. there's no code for # yet...
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday August 27 2016, @03:27AM
in this baidu stanford experiment there was no punctuation nor capital letters so the comparison to morse code is apt
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmoschner on Friday August 26 2016, @01:22AM
This isn't so much that voice is so much better, as typing on a phone is a pain and seems to be getting worse. By the time you get used to a particular phone and the picky behavior of its keyboard and have auto-correct more or less tamed, it is time for a new phone and to start the process over again with another poorly designed UI.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @01:35AM
On the contraryy, auto-correct trained me into the patterrn of tapping space-backspace-space to cancel auto-corect, its how I managed to tap so many spellling errors into this posttt.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday August 26 2016, @05:36AM
If it is that bad, you can disable it.