Task 3: Voice to Text

I found this exercise to be challenging in a few ways. First of all, I tried using my phone’s voice to text keyboard, but ran into an issue with a time limit of 60 seconds. Then I found myself having difficulty speaking for enough time while on my own without feeling so self conscious that it had an effect on what I was saying. Finally, I found a tool that worked well (https://speechnotes.co/) and I left it on while I did some ironing, so that my hands were busy while I was speaking and I wasn’t staring at the words appearing while I spoke. 

I found this to be an interesting exercise in that the text I created by speaking is very different from anything I would create while writing. There is very little punctuation and what punctuation that is present is incorrect, as in it is in places that it should not be. Other than punctuation, the biggest mistakes come from the tool incorrectly recognizing words. For example, ‘tourists’ became ‘Taurus,’ ‘guide’ became ‘God,’ and ‘Hurghada, Dahab, and El Gouna’ became ‘Hurghada avant alguna.’ Other than errors in specific words, there are some issues in syntax. As I was recording the text while simultaneously coming up with it, it isn’t polished in the way that many oral histories are. I think not only is there a big difference between a written text and a spoken text, but there is also a difference in a text that has been rehearsed in order to be passed down within a culture with oral histories and a text that has been created in an ‘off the cuff’ manner. If my story had been scripted, it would certainly be longer. I found myself speaking fairly slowly and deliberately so that I wouldn’t get too far ahead of my thoughts. I find when I am speaking something that is scripted (and especially one that is practiced) I will speak many more words in the same amount of time. I think even if I had created a rough outline of what I wanted to talk about and had planned it out ahead of time, it would have created a very different text. When writing a text, I spend a good amount of time planning what I will write before beginning the writing process and that is something that was missing from this process and as a result the text is vastly different from anything I would write. 

My text is below, unedited, unorganized, and imperfect.

“I moved to Egypt in my second year of teaching and it was without a doubt one of the scariest and hardest thing I’ve ever done I didn’t know anybody I didn’t know much about Egyptian culture I didn’t know any Arabic and it was only my second year of teaching so I didn’t even know much about teaching If we’re honest but despite all that I thought I would give it a try and I ended up having awesome adventure first of all the teaching I probably work harder at classroom management that I’ve ever worked before in my life having to teach students who are from a completely different culture than your own who are also learning their second language all while yeah was a challenge living in Egypt also came with its challenges I experienced a lot of sexual harassment on the streets I would say on a daily basis usually it was limited to but there were also times where I was physically assaulted by strangers on the street despite that it was an incredible experience and one I am so glad that I have while living in Egypt I had the opportunity to travel around the country a lot and since it was a difficult time for Egypt I moved there in the middle of the second revolution while the country was more or less on lockdown there was a nightly curfew and there were still daily. In various parts of the city so as a result there were not a lot of people visiting Egypt so having the opportunity to visit different areas of the country without any Taurus was ones. Incredible on one in one way and absolutely heartbreaking in another because you could absolutely see the way. We’re suffering the lack of tourist had just an incredible economic impact on the lives of so many people and it was very sad but it also made being one of the few tourist overwhelming in a big way because vendors were constantly jockeying for your attention hoping to make a sale and many of them would be pretty aggressive but then you would go to visit a temple and the group of people you were visiting with so I can one case I went with my mom and once I went with two friends and there were times where we were wandering through these like pretty big Temple complexes with absolutely nobody there but us and the staff and our God and so you’re just wandering around with absolutely nobody else getting to take your time look at what you want wander around and about to experience but I don’t think many people have ever had because there were so few tourists at the time near the end of my time in Egypt I was there for three years things will get better and on trips to Alexandria and on trips to the Red Sea like Hurghada avant alguna we did see more tourists so seeing their rebound of the tourism industry over the three years and I was there was great but it apparently was nothing like it was before you know when I was visiting lower Egypt so Luxor and Aswan we were on a very small cruise ship on the Nile and that one stop there were about maybe 20 ships and our tour guides. In the peak of of Tourism prior to the first Revolution it wouldn’t be uncommon to be upwards of a thousand of the same ships there at any given time and so to visually see that difference in the amount of tourist was crazy I couldn’t imagine what it would be like with a thousand ships”