Link Week 3 – Voice to Text (Laura Ulrich)

Laura Ulrich:  https://blogs.ubc.ca/lauraulrich/2020/05/20/voice-to-text/

Laura’s approach to the task was very similar to mine.  We both dictated a personal story using a dictation program.  Laura used the Google void-to-text and I used the dictation app connected to Word.  Both programs resulted in text with no punctuation – that made both stories practically speaking unreadable.  (I have since learned that if I had dictated using the Word app including punctuation, that punctuation would have been translated from voice to text.  (This is something I have previously done in law when dictating for an assistant and then laterally for a computer generated service to create documents from dictation.  I think this process is likely foreign to those who have not dictated punctuation – but it comes pretty second nature after a few tries).

Laura’s blog post architecture is (I think) in WordPress, with modifications done to personalize the blog so much as to look like a website.  My architecture, a basic WordPress blog provides the information in a clean, useable manner, but lacks the polish of Laura’s presentation.

Laura and I both had the same view as to our end result – the oral story, with and without some scripting.  I think that really speaks to how we now process text.  Both of believed that with scripting (and for me atleast some notes), our stories would have been better organized and more cohesive.

The issue of editing came up.  I would personally find it tougher to edit a voice text versus a written text.  The technology for editing on a computer (or tablet) is for me much simpler than editing voice.  (Perhaps with practice this is possible – but without being able to see entire sentences or paragraphs to put the voice text into context, changing same might be difficult).

Laura importantly noted that voice-to-text may be used for convenience, but that it should not be considered “oral storytelling”  Laura goes on to explain that oral storytellers can use non-verbal communication, expressions and movement to captivate their audience(s).  This is an important distinction – but tells us, that voice-to-text may have limitations, notwithstanding that tone and attitude in an oral commentary can convey additional information that written text.