My 5 minute, unscripted speech to text:

So I have to talk for 5 minutes this is going to be very difficult if I have to think about what to talk about I might explain what I am doing with my grace one and two students in school I’m so for the past 2 weeks we are learning about different family structures family adoption foster care moving into where we are learning now of culture and Heritage and I found a really interesting and relating to last week’s video is that well for children to understand the concept friends their class we’re all from different part of the world is too hard for them to comprehend so I put together a world map where I can put their name on the location on the map and they can see a visually of how far those countries are from Canada and then we moved into you know we noticed that there is a high percentage of students. Their grandparents were from mainland China Taiwan Hong Kong and Macau so the main language there are Chinese and Mandarin speakers so we ended up moving to comparing English to Mandarin which we also talked about masculine and feminine so in English you know what an object or person is by how we see it for example he or the car you know what usually use more masculine word to describe it where as a mandarin Deo he she it it’s all the same. Tell the difference is when you write it down that you can see from the character that what is masculine what is feminine and we actually have words for when it’s animal or non-human and yeah that was really interesting and also we were counting numbers when I’m teaching math and Western countries we count from one sound from one hand starting a 1/2 the other hand Pinky and we reach 10 how every many Asian countries they have very specific finger gesture for the number six or seven or nine depends and some places only need one hand to count from 1 to 10 so we thought that was very interesting. Everyone else in the class and looking back in my own background while I was originally from Taiwan and both my parents be caca which is one of the top three languages spoken on in Taiwan and even within the hakka language they are too mean. And my mother speaks the oceanic which sounded more like she’s singing and she told me that Fisherman’s used to sing a higher pitch to convey what they need where is my dad’s folk the mainland Africa assertive and masculine because you don’t need to raise your voice over the water and the wind so yeah that’s quite interesting so I shared that with my class they thought it was very interesting because most of them are born in Canada and they learn English and when they speak with their family at home they try to learn their family language but they speak quite little and this is also a growing concern for families everywhere that there go to the movie theatre

My two cents about speech to text based on what was recorded:

Reading back on my speech, I noticed that it is very informal compared to written English. When I write, I try my best to write following the English grammar rules. Depending on the purpose and the target audience, I can choose to write more formally or write casually for fun. Looking back at my speech, I can tell that verbal English tend to be less formal with more fillers with words like, “um, so, and,” etc. I’ve gone back and turned the part of speech that was recorded incorrectly to the colour red to make it easier to see how many mistakes recorded. It is easy to see the common mistakes made repeatedly. Words like “um, and, however, whereas” were almost all recorded incorrectly. I think these words are incorrect and replaced with another vocabulary that is used more commonly in the area of similar-sounding speech.

If this speech is scripted and prepped ahead of time, the number of fillers would minimize making this speech-to-text more successful in its translation. When we prepare our own script and being able to read as we go, we will be able to read more fluently and with clearer enunciation. This is what makes oral storytelling such an incredible skill. Storytellers need to have a good memory of what they need to convey and with proper sequence, by memory, while being able to do so full of emotions to convince the audience. Reading monotone to a computer is just not the same experience as reading a book to another person.