This speech recognition software is much faster than human typists

Speech recognition software used to be awful. It couldn't deal with background noise, its vocabulary was limited and it was awkward to use in public. 

But we've come a long way. A new speech recognition system can transcribe English or Mandarin about three times faster than humans can type on a smartphone, according to a recent study. Developers from the popular Chinese search engine Baidu created the program back in December. It's called Deep Speech 2, and it uses machine learning to vastly improve speech recognition. 

The study, a collaboration between Stanford University, Baidu and the University of Washington, also found that the system produced 20.4 percent fewer errors than people typing in English and 63.8 percent fewer than people working in Mandarin.  Read more...