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Study: Voice Recognition Better than Humans Using an On-Screen Keyboard

posted by martyb on Friday August 26 2016, @12:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-sample-bias dept.

takyon writes:

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).

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @12:31AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @12:31AM (#393255)

    ...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

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @12:38AM (#393259)

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @01:58AM (#393290)

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @07:24AM (#393383)
    How fast is that expert at entering hash tags? ;)

    p.s. there's no code for # yet...

    • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday August 27 2016, @03:27AM

      by butthurt (6141) on Saturday August 27 2016, @03:27AM (#393843) Journal

      in this baidu stanford experiment there was no punctuation nor capital letters so the comparison to morse code is apt