Voice Recognition Software Beats Humans at Typing

It is, and like any skill it improves with practice.

The primary difference I observe between typing and dictation is the latter requires more forethought and precision to produce a good result. When typing, it's easy to try out many lexical variations very quickly, because the friction of editing is extremely low. This is not true of dictation.

You may find it beneficial, as I have, to pause after each sentence and take a moment to formulate the next in general terms before continuing to speak. You need feel no urgency when dictating to a computer, and to have a general outline in mind of what you mean to say makes it much easier to do so without stumbling or hesitating partway through.

It also helps to treat dictation as a first draft, rather than a finished product. I gather that in the days when personal assistants still took dictation, they did so in order to type up a draft for review and potential correction by the person dictating the document. While we now largely dictate text to computers rather than other people, the method of treating dictation results as drafts for review still has much to recommend it.

For dictating this means planning ahead to make sure that the sentence is well-formed. Have you watched yourself type? There's a lot of backtracking, erases and restarts. The feedback from dictating is also slower, which then affects your input rate. If you do manage to ignore this and speak free flow, even with perfect recognition (which is impossible even for humans), you will have to go back and edit grammatical and cohesion errors.

The advantages of typing are faster feedback (this is unavoidable as the computational needs will always be less), working memory augmentation and better nonlinearity for edits.

When you take into account all that, the time to correct grammatical and spelling errors, to edit for comprehensibility, I doubt that speaking will come out ahead because input bandwidth is only the bottleneck for trivial pieces.

I would imagine the weirder comparison is that I can type my thoughts into a box just fine, but speaking them makes them all jumbled. I guess it's because I'm used to comment boxes triggering my "let's write a comment" mode, so I would need some time to get used to dictating them.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en-GB

It also produces amusing gibberish if the accents are strong enough.

Humans don't do well with that, they look at something and their brain fills it in correctly for them, it's easy to miss typos in your own work. When I used to do helpdesk and someone had password problems I'd have them retype their usernames, because they would not notice it was wrong, but it was often the problem.

More than a decade ago, I saw voice dictation working 100% perfectly. The guy who did that was being paid to do the demo by the software company that wrote the voice recognition program, and he had obviously spent a lot of hours doing demos.

He wasn't faking anything, he was just doing it really well.

Other people who have an incentive to learn it can usually do it pretty well too. They are mostly people who are using their hands for something else, eg doing autopsies, or who don't have hands.