Dictation
This hello, this is a test dictation test wow this isn’t very good so I’m gonna tell the story about all the Ramen. I’ve eaten around the world like many people in the early 2000s I became kind of infatuated with David Chang the famous American chef I need to show on Netflix called the mind of a chef I think, basically it was like him going around and cooking interesting things and I don’t remember much of it but I do remember is when episode several episodes I think he’s in Japan eating Ramen at that point my life I’ve actually been to Japan, but I’ve never really had Ramen you know the first time was kind of naïve didn’t really like much into the food culture basically I am ended up becoming extremely interested in like Ramen. I started out by you know eating Ramen locally in Vancouver and I was hooked. I eventually got David Chang‘s Momofuku cookbook and made my own Ramen broth from scratch is an often 24 to 48 hour process, there was a period of three years where I was living in Vancouver co-op job and I tried to eat every Ramen restaurant in the metro Vancouver area and I’m definitely missing one or two, but I think I got them all and I would say that my favorite definitely a little underrated one so if you and stuff that they’re the Ramen, the Ramen subculture is very much you know Vancouver will say Ramen Domo is way to go Ramen Domo global chain I don’t think it’s that big but it’s big enough to be referred to a chain. There’s actually two in Vancouver and it’s incredibly reliable. It’s very good. My location is got a small little shop on fourth just fantastic but that’s not my favorite. I think it’s a little overrated. It’s it’s it’s very standard Ramen. My favorite is called. Gill para Ramen on Broadway in Arbutus and it’s also a small shop but they do they do the standards you know they do she Ramen miso Ramen. They also do seasonal stuff things like they take on Ramen. They’re willing to experiment a bit more and do some fun variations that I think really ones a lot to what is very complicated but very standard dish ultimately and then so I was Vancouver then finally in 2015 I think I went to Japan again this time I knew I wanted to eat a lot of Ramen so I started out by going to this at the time was quite a popular place in Tokyo and they were known for their Roman men so superman is where you get the noodles and the broth surf separately which can be absolutely amazing because you get like really thick broth really concentrated broth and every time you dip it’s just like so good noodles are kind of just like this vehicle for thick broth and then once you’re done like the good restaurant, you know it’s real in restaurant at your table. There’s a it looks like a little coffee kettle tea kettle thing, but it’s filled with hot water and water down your broth and drink it. It’s amazing so I went to this place and that was very memorable experience. There’s all these like people business men lining up for lunch and you know if you tourists and you put your order into the machine and your card to the shaft when you sit down and then you get your Ramen that was rememberable eating Ramen all over Japan was back in Japan last year and the more Ramen had some incredible dishes went to Miche mission star Michelin, Bandan places that were like mind-boggling good Ramen. Anna on that trip my friend who was traveling with was adamant about eating Ramen every day and by the last day, we are all a bit tired of eating Ramen, but she was on a mission and she had heard about this Ramen place where I think it was called Gojira Ramen or like the bowl was called Kujira anyway Guajira I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure Gojira and Japanese means Godzilla and if you’re ordering the Godzilla bowl, you’re getting an enormous bowl of Ramen like massive and she woke up early in the morning like and went to this Ramen spot and she was the only tourist there she gets her seed she gets this enormous bowl of Ramen and keep in mind. It’s this is August and Tokyo it is like 35° like 90% humidity. It is hot, and so not exactly conducive for you know eating an enormous amount of food in general let alone Ramen, which is not the lightest meal so she gets her bowl and it is literally overflowing like a massive bowl and broth plus just heat with toppings now this is all secondhand. I wasn’t there, but she just starts sweating. You know she’s trying to eat this bowl there’s guys around her just crushing their balls and leaving. Meanwhile she’s slowly taking her time like really trying to get this down and she can’t and she’s so embarrassed, cause she doesn’t wanna leave without emptying her ball, so she has to go into the bathroom and wipe the sweat off brow splash your face with water and she goes back out keeps trying to work on this bowl and she can’t do it. She has to throw on the towel and so she she waits until the chef runs. She runs out of the shop, so shamed anyway I’ve been talking. This must been five minutes. Let’s see what this looks like.
Analysis
I remember back in the late 2000s playing with speech-to-text as a novelty, but I haven’t touched it since, barring accidentally hitting the dictation button on my phone once or twice. Given that, I’m actually shocked at how truly bad the built-in Apple dictation feature is. While I didn’t approach this storytelling with perfect enunciation and grammar, I also didn’t mumble or stumble my way through it either, which is not what one might think if they tried to read the resulting dictation.
The first egregious deviation in the dictation results from standard written English conventions is the punctuation. The dictation software could not discern the flow of sentences, struggling with haphazard comma placement and inexplicable periods, sometimes mid-sentence. My cadence and speaking when I told the story was very informal compared to written English, which clearly made it difficult for the software to parse and structure in a logical way. I regularly paused to collect my thoughts and added several short asides, sometimes interrupting myself. This results in a text that with no clear structure. Instead, the output of the dictation is a lengthy wall of text, with no line breaks, constant run-on sentences, and no discernible flow. Am I a gifted storyteller/orator? Definitely not. But these dictation results certainly aren’t doing me any favours either.
There is a lot wrong in the text, beyond its lack of structure. Every few sentences are rife with misinterpretations of what was said, making for a jarring read. Small verbs are missing throughout the text, some nouns and tenses are incorrect. All which contribute to an awkward, unstructured read becoming even more disjointed.
What is right? For the most part, the resulting transcription is a relatively accurate recreation of my oration. Yes, it misses the mark here and there, but many of the flaws that make it border-line unreadable are simply an artifact of it being a 1:1 textual representation of my words, “you knows” and anecdotes and all.
The mistakes are plentiful. Many words are misinterpreted by the dictation: tsukemen, the delicious dipping ramen, is written as “superman”. Gojira, the classic Japanese godzilla monster, is written correctly once, then as Kujira, then Guajira. Ramen is not a proper noun, yet is consistently capitalized throughout the text, and even misinterpreted as “Roman man” in one instance. Michelin star produces similar results, turned into “Miche mission star Michelin”.
If scripted, I believe the resulting dictation results may not necessarily have been perfect, but certainly much more coherent. Scripting would have provided the text with much more traditional written narrative structure. Instead of anecdotes, asides, and me saying “you know” a lot, the story would have been much more concise and had better flow. Scripting would not have resolved the outright mistakes, but many of the issues pertaining to its textual representation would have been mitigated. As Ong describes in The Orality of Language (2002), writing enhanced orality, transforming it into a structured, well-organized science. If I had written my story first, it would have benefited from the guidelines and standards one expects from written text, leading to improved oratory delivery. Though as Ong mentions, doing so would have marked me as a disgracefully incompetent orator!
The juxtaposition between this textual representation of my oration and my actual delivery is pretty stark. The resulting text is a meandering, barely intelligible mess, for three key reasons. The first is simple: the technology isn’t perfect. There are errors abound, many clearly a result of the software’s inability to interpret my speech accurately. The second is prominent, the text is entirely unstructured. It lacks any of the standards or structure we expect when consuming writing. Lastly, it bears all the hallmarks of unscripted, improvised oration. Oral storytelling involves repetition, clichés, and direct address to the audience in order to engage and enhance the story’s rhetorical power (Ong, 2002). It is also inherently ephemeral (Gnanadesikan, 2008). Had I not been speaking into dictation software, my story would only exist in my memory. Certainly, my story is worlds away from Mark Antony’s funeral oration, but my continual repetition and direct address are clear and common characteristics of oral storytelling.
In contrast, written storytelling is a science, full of rules, structure, and precision. Gnanadesikan (2008) describes writing as more deliberate than speaking – even this sentence has received more consideration and contemplation than an entire minute of my story. My story, transformed into text by Apple’s dictation software, is now material and permanent. It exists as a tangible artifact, both on my phone and now on this blog post, and could (hypothetically) be disseminated and spread to an audience far greater than the one I could ever tell the story to aloud.
This task utilized technology to expose the distinct characteristics of oral and written storytelling. By transcribing oration directly into text, it becomes immediately apparent how our expectations between oration and writing differ drastically. In this case, the written results leave much to be desired, but it nonetheless serves to transform the ephemeral into the tangible.
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