A smartphone speech recognition app can write text messages three times faster than humans, say researchers, adding that the discovery can spur the development of innovative speech recognition apps. Computer scientists from Stanford University, Chinese web services company Baidu and University of Washington devised an experiment that pitted Baidu's Deep Speech 2 cloud-based speech recognition software against 32 texters, ages 19 to 32, working the built-in keyboard on an Apple iPhone. "They grew up texting, so we're putting speech recognition up against people who are really good at this task," said James Landay, professor of computer science at Stanford. The subjects took turns typing or speaking about 100 phrases sourced from a standard library of everyday phrases such as "physics and chemistry are hard," "have a good weekend" and "go out for some pizza and beer". The testing app recorded their times and accuracy rates. Half the sub