Again, speaking for speech to text takes some practice, so it doesn't quite make sense to compare a lifetime of typing against your first shot at speech recognition.
People can also write shorthand with a pen at 300+ wpm.
A big part of the problem with regular typing is that our phonetic alphabet is not optimized for writing efficiency. Sometimes a single syllable takes 5+ discrete characters to type.
Standard QWERTY-style keyboards are also designed to use single finger motions in serial fashion, and requires various awkward combinations of finger motions and plenty of repositioning between keypresses; the design is designed for learnability rather than efficiency, and wastes much of the possible bandwidth of the hands.
If someone with deep knowledge of human hand physiology / neuroanatomy were to design a keyboard optimized for efficiency (at the expense of requiring years to properly master), we could probably push peak performance to 400–500 wpm.
At some point thinking speed is the main bottleneck though. Regular QWERTY keyboards are fast enough to keep up well enough with most writing tasks.
Per language.
The world record for speaking is about 600 WPM. The world record for stenographers is about 360 WPM.
A typical speed for speech is 150 WPM, for someone who is practiced but by no means an expert. A typical (but somewhat fast) speed for typing is 80 WPM, for someone who is practiced but not an expert.
So if you're going to compare the fastest speeds or the typical speeds, speaking comes out ahead either way. It's almost as if our ancestors had evolutionary pressure to develop speech, but lacked the same kind of evolutionary pressure for typing.
As for auctioneers, most of what they say is repetition and filler. The fast talking is a gimmicky technique aimed at improving sales, not a practical tool for imparting information at maximum possible speed.
As I said before, the keyboard is not remotely optimized for the capabilities of human hands, and English orthography is not remotely optimized for information density as an encoding the spoken language.
If someone speaking had to say a full syllable for every letter, speaking speed would be much slower.
> almost as if our ancestors had evolutionary pressure to develop speech, but lacked the same kind of evolutionary pressure for typing.
More precisely, speech was developed over millennia by millions of people mutating it slowly over time, whereas modern typing hardware was designed by a single person, based on the mechanical characteristics of a particular prototype typewriter in the late 19th century (before any concept of “touch typing” even existed, and typists were forced to adapt to this mostly fixed hardware design as best they could.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-fastest-rapper-in-the...
Python, you have to say return space space space space every damn line. Return space space space space space space space space while inside a function. It would nearly drive a man to switch to tabs.
Navigation, "go 2 characters to the right" isn't pleasant.
To top it all of picture the fun you can have in vim using speech to text. Dear lord.
Now imagine an open office full of people all doing this at the same time. That my friend, is hell.
Interesting convergence would be VR mixed with TTS processing. So, you use VR and presence/hand tracking to physically interact and words to refine and/or program the visual blocks.