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

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).


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  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday August 26 2016, @04:07AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Friday August 26 2016, @04:07AM (#393329) Journal

    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.

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