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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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 26 2016, @01:40AM
I've forgotten title and author, but I do remember a story I read long ago.
The premise was that a child should grow up with his AI. The kid got his "first real AI" device at about age 4 or 5. To him, it was just another toy, but the thing was pretty much indestructible, and it accompanied the kid everywhere. And, it "learned" the kid, just as the kid learned to use the AI. Each learned the other's idiosyncracies, their vocabulary grew together, and they understood each other. Child and AI became life companions.
Their education progressed in tandem, as well. As a kid, there was no need for the AI to have access to periodic charts, chemistry formulas, etc, but when the kid needed things, they were added to the AI.
What we have today, are the simplistic kid's toys, but the toys don't "grow" as time passes. They just stay toys. Even the relatively sophisticated desktops are still stuck at the toy level. No computer that I've ever seen is capable of offering meaningful advice. Instead, you have to search specifically for bits of data, then form your own advice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @01:44AM
So exactly like a coder and Stack Overflow account?
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday August 26 2016, @12:34PM
Because we have nothing close to approaching AI still? Literally the only surprising ability in the last 20 years was Google's Go machine and that's a ternary state game on a fixed size board (I'm a mathematician so I'm perfectly aware that that was still a heck of a leap in achievement).
Fact is, we don't have "AI" and aren't anywhere close.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @05:55PM
Debugging that sounds, uhm, time consuming. Make change, compile, wait for AI and child to grow to adulthood, test. Repeat?!