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Comment by psykovsky | Hacker News Reader

can you speak faster than you type?

The speed of input is not, I believe, what is most meaningful about using voice to deliver computer instructions. Rather, it is the voice's unique capability to convey meaning to other humans that text simply cannot convey. There is a power held within the human voice that has yet to be fully exploited by software, although Baker did much great work towards this goal.

Speech to text, to me, is so attractive because it may help to usher in a whole new, even more powerful input paradigm than anything else in-use today. It's not about speed - it's about precision.

EDIT: A study demonstrating my point can be found here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3243272/

Can't most people?

Not if they type a lot.

Typical speech is about 150 wpm, and someone making an effort can talk faster. Even the fastest typists on standard QWERTY-type keyboards have trouble keeping up with average conversation. Transcriptionists use specialized chording keyboards and can type 200+ wpm in a dedicated phonetic one-chord-per-syllable shorthand with abbreviations for common words.

I have no idea how well current speech-to-text programs keep up with 150–200 wpm speech though.

Ok, that's a good point. Thanks!

On a full size keyboard? Most veteran typists can put down words at or above natural speech rate, especially the somewhat slow and stilted speech that seems to work best for those dictation software packages.

Do you have a citation of some sort for this? Seems a bit far-fetched unless it's a person that specializes in typing language very fast. I've used computers for >8 hours a day for two decades, writing a lot of long texts in that time, and I'm nowhere near being able to type as fast as I can talk. Certainly not when it comes to a sustained pace for more than a few minutes.

I'm not the op, but here's one quote that deals with the issue. (Source - http://www.speakeasysolutions.com/blog/2011/06/01/the-myths-...)

(Short answer = that depends...and software like Dragon has many other advantages/drawbacks that factor in.)

"For myself, let’s compare typing vs dictating, given the above information and a 1,000 word email.

Straight typing: 90 wpm = 11.11 minutes, no proofreading allowance, correcting errors as typed.

Dictating with Dragon: 140 wpm dictating (7.14 minutes) + 300 wpm proofreading (3.33 minutes) + correcting 10 errors @ 10 seconds each (1.67 minutes) = 12.14 minutes.

For an average professional, typing speed is rated at 50 wpm. A 1,000 word email would take approximately 20 minutes to type.

For an average professional, their dictation with Dragon stats would approximate my own (12 minutes) — they are not unreasonable."

Cool, thanks :) I agree that comparing dictation speed to typing speed is a different question if you're a fast typist. On a phone, it's no contest -- for me, even in my native language, dictating with Siri is vastly quicker -- but I wouldn't actually want to dictate when I write comments online, for instance.

When dictating, you also hit the classical problem of your thoughts not forming fast enough to be able to formulate yourself in writing in real time, leading to a lot of breaks as you dictate. The guideline "think, then speak" of radio communication also holds for dictation, in my experience.

Let's not forget languages that aren't ideally served by qwerty - I'm thinking asian languages in particular. Even therein, there's chinese, which has a high semantic density to syllable count, vs say japanese, which requires more syllables* to say the same thing.

*more keystrokes but same time spoken, as the natural speech cadence is faster. Can't remember source right now.

Of course those Asian languages that are difficult to type are also difficult for speech to text programs, especially ones like Japanese where understanding the context is important for choosing the correct glyph.

I can't

Now imagine if you had to wait for a software to understand what you said... the delay kills the experience.

i definitely type faster than i talk

source: grew up in the 90's in Silicon Valley

The Guiness World Record holder for typing can sustain 150 wpm on a Dvorak keyboard for 50 minutes [0]. Compare this to the average audiobook: "Audiobooks are recommended to be 150–160 words per minute, which is the range that people comfortably hear and vocalize words." [1]

So either you speak really slowly or perhaps you should challenge the world record. I've been touch typing for more than 25 years (though not in Silicon Valley, so maybe I'm lacking some magical force as a result) and can comfortably sustain 60 wpm, bursting up to about 100 wpm. There's no way I can even come close to the rate at which I'm able to speak in a sustained manner.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Alphanumeric_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Speech_and_li...

Growing up I knew a lady at church that definetly typed faster than I talked. She was brilliant, and should have been more than a typist, but that was the era.

I did a stint at the Coroner' office as a intern. The doctor would at 2-3x speech into a tape recorder. I used to think he was trying to impress us by speaking so fast. "The patient had a descending artery over 50 percent occluded. The ears were symmetrical and no disginguising features. Pause Dotty--put a comma between symmetrical, and and)" Well I don't think he was showing off, just a fast thinker, and knew his job. Always wondered why he was concerned about a person's ears--maybe a pet project?

Anyways, Dotty would type those tapes, and hardly ever used the rewind button. To this day, I think about her typing skills. Nice person too.

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