Voice Recognition Beats Humans at Typing

From Aarti Shahani at NPR:

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…

…”People probably play with Siri and find oh, it didn’t give them the right answer. So they don’t think to use speech as a way to do their text messaging or their email or what not,” [Stanford computer scientist James Landay] says. “Using speech for those things is now working really well.”

This reflects my own experience where I often find myself in situations where using Siri’s speech-to-text is the best way to quickly reply to a message, and while Siri’s still hit or miss with personal assistance tasks, the misses are almost never because he/she failed to capture what I said.