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: 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.