For this task I used the built-in voice-to-text feature of an iPhone, using the Notes app. Here is the result:
so we have a second bedroom in our apartment that we have been using as a TV room I mean your room I guess it has a nice couch and mounted the TV on the wall and has speakers and a stereo also why everything wired through the wall so it all looks nice but now we need to change it back from a TV room into a bedroom to use it for someone to be sleeping in the future in the near future so I have to move the TV and put it somewhere else and she decided to put it into our main bedroom which isn’t exactly what we had more but that originally but that’s OK so at first it was pretty straightforward to take it off the wall move everything and put it into the other bedroom but then I realized we now have about six fairly large holes in the wall that I’m going to have to catch up before were able to use the room in the bedroom again normally it’s not a big deal just go to the store and get what I need if I was missing anything and then start on it I did actually need to get a few things but right now course there’s a pandemic so it’s a little hard to or makes it a bit harder to go to the store bit of more of an adventure now to go to the store and buy whatever you need I’ve ended up having to go about four or five separate times now I have to go and put a mask on and lineup outside the store luck with the weather‘s been nice so it hasn’t been a huge deal but it is still make it a bit more interesting and a bit more frustrating every time I realize that missing something that I need to get it done and then I just patching the holes and send it down and patching again it’s taking quite a bit longer than expected luckily there’s not a huge time crunch involved to have lots of time to do it but still a little frustrating so now I have a a while that is mostly patched but not quite completely finished and a TV in the bedroom which I never really wanted before but we don’t have anywhere else to put it can’t even really get rid of it or give it to a friend either sell it at this point because of the pandemic makes that kind of thing a little bit more challenging as well. I’m also gonna have to go in and buy some paint to repaint the wall Home Depot of course didn’t have the what I needed so I have to go to some other paint store which is only open till 4 PM because they have reduced hours which also makes it harder to go and get what we need.I’m also a little more conscious of the noise that my home renovations make since everyone else is also at home most the day or most people are not going to work at this point so I’m trying to limit the amount of noise I make while I’m doing this which normally isn’t as big of an issue. I am almost done though which is nice so we should soon have a wall that hopefully looks almost like new like there was never any hole holes punched into it and will have a functioning second bedroom once again.
How does the text deviate from written English?
Besides making me sound insane, it deviates quite a bit! I only realized at the very end that the app doesn’t punctuate at all automatically, but that I can add a period by saying “period”. It also oddly didn’t capitalize the very first word. Beyond the complete lack of punctuation, including no commas, there are also no separate paragraphs, so it ends up being almost entirely one long rambling incoherent sentence. I googled iphone dictation commands after I completed this, and realized there are ways to add these missing things:
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT208343
- Quote/end quote: begin and end a quote
- New paragraph: start a new paragraph
- New line: begin a new line
- Cap: capitalize the next word
- Caps on/caps off: capitalize the first character of each word
Obviously that is something I should have looked into before recording!
The text also reads like it is someone speaking instead of something that is written. By this I mean it has more casual language, and lots of interjections mid-sentence or mid-thought. There are also errors in the choice of words, but also likely some errors that were made when I was speaking that technically the app recorded correctly – it’s just that I misspoke (repeated words for example). It also correctly translated very casual word usage such as ‘gonna’ which I wouldn’t normally use in written communication. I think some of the mistakes in the text were the app trying to interpret “hmms”, “ummms”, and “ahs”, which interestingly it didn’t record verbatim but instead appears to have tried to translate into words at times, and ignored completely at others. It has many cases of missed words as well, which cause grammatical errors in some of the sentences, an example being “most the day” instead of “most of the day”.
An example of an error in the text that is also commonly missed by spellchecker software is the use of “lineup” when it should be the verb form “line up”. It made some mistakes that may be due to the way I pronounce words, such as “luck” where it should be “lucky”, “catch” instead of “patch”, or “make” where it should be “made”. It seemed to miss or misinterpret the start or end of many words.
Many of the mistakes in the text I believe are due to the way that I speak, I may start to say something, pause, rethink what I am saying and then either interject with some new thought, or continue but in a different way. If this were written first rather than spoken, that would all be edited out and the text would flow much more coherently and with more purpose. It would also make much more sense with commas where there should be pauses or interjections.
The lack of punctuation is the biggest mistake, and it is definitely a mistake, as it changes the meaning of several sections, as well as makes the story much harder to read. The lack of punctuation actually makes it incredibly tiring to try to read.
Oral storytelling allows for more variation – parts can be added on the fly and the story can be changed to suit the audience, as examples. It does suffer from a lack of coherence and intention. It is much more difficult to stay on point, as you can easily become distracted and lose your place in the story or your line of thought. I found myself at a lack for words at a few points, and had large pauses which would have been very awkward had anyone been listening. I think if I had known the main punctuation commands before starting the story would have turned out much better, and the stopping at the end of each sentence or paragraph to say the punctuation command may have allowed me to better organize my thoughts on the story and stay on point. I assumed that this app would attempt to automatically punctuate, as I have used other software in the past that did so. If I had scripted the story, I think ultimately it would have been more interesting. It would have had a clear beginning, middle, and end, and had some purpose to it. This ended up being a rambling story without a real purpose or clear end to it, I more or less just stopped speaking at some point. Recording a story seemed to be more difficult than telling a story to people. When I am actually speaking to people, my expressions and gestures add to the story, and I am able to interact with the audience. Recording a story with no script or audience proved a real challenge.