Voice to text

Here is the text that I dictated to Word:

“After some reflection I decided to talk to you a little bit about my favorite places to go and visit while in Paris until recently I was living there for three years and so they got him thinking about a lot so I thought I would tell you a bit about it I have 60 replaces that I would recommend going to see obviously there are hundreds of more places to go and explore while you’re there number one would be the loop of course people typically go there to go see the Mona Lisa however I love to go see lots of different things in the local museum I used to go there mostly during the night hours because it’s a lot more quiet there are hardly any tourists and you kind of get some space yourself if you’re in the hue sector of the museum as sunset is happening look outside the window and you’ll see a beautiful sunset across the museum my favorite painting there is called the coronation of Napoleon I think the painter was called Jack something David there’s also this really cool underground area that I didn’t really explore until later on in my time in Paris super interesting and as a teacher I got a year pass which allowed me to go to the museum for free throughout the year and so one of my favorite places to go with the the statues room it’s really bright it’s really lit up it’s really beautiful and sometimes I would just go read there would you mind marking their this leads me on to my second museum the museum else it used to be a railway station I think in the late 1800s there’s lots of impressionist and post impressionist paintings you’ll find paintings by Monet Monet deaga and so many more I see your money you can also find sorry not money money see you money you can go see monies waterlillies called only it’s just across the river I really love to go in there too it’s super small mostly most of the time it’s super busy um it’s really beautiful to go and see that at least once I would recommend would be the hotel museum I didn’t go down to my last year in Paris but I really loved it because you got to go visit hotels house you got you can go visit his gardens and all the rooms of the house pretty much and it’s in the middle of the city but you wouldn’t know it by walking around the grounds you can go admire all the statues the place I would recommend to go see is of course the versaille are palace I know a lot of people have to go see the palace however I usually go to her side to go explore the gardens there so many places to go and see and every time I go I explore a different part of the garden scratch there so huge my favorite parts of the garden so far is when you go to the palace come come clear now it’s like a smaller palace I think it was built by Louis XIV’s are kind of escape from palace life at Versailles which is kind of funny because it’s still quite a big palace but you get to walk through that into other parts of the gardens and that’s where you can find the Queens hamlet which to me was absolutely insane there’s an entire village out there the windmill and bunch of houses you still like to go and relax and kind of forget that she was living in a palace but it’s still very extravagant very beautiful surrounded by gardens and trees and rivers and animals and all those things very breathtaking lastly I’ll mention the sexy girl it’s the I guess in English would be called the basilica of the Sacred Heart I’ve found in mark area of Paris it’s very old part of Paris and this statue there actually nearby it’s called the best nearby and is based on the story about a man who could walk through walls Anne until I have saved up various for now”

I have never used voice-to-text technologies before so there are several things I missed that would have made this text more coherent. In general, I find it a bit odd to record myself speaking, so to avoid overthinking about what was being recorded, I focused on what I was trying to say instead.

If you are curious, here is the recording:

How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?

The dictated text is a run-on sentence with absolutely no punctuation from start to finish. Punctuation is used to “provide visual rather than auditory cues for information structure in written English” (Moore, 2016, p. 1). Without it, it is difficult to determine the tone of the text, where the emphasis of the sentence is and therefore the emotion behind it. Although I believe one can say “comma”, or “exclamation point”, or “full stop” to the voice-to-text software, this is not something that comes naturally to me. If I had been focusing on dictating punctuation in the text without reading it off a script, I would not have been able to have a natural flow in my story. Ironically, what would allow for a story with good audible flow (one voice-to-text) would be a story with terrible visual flow.

This text also lacks structure and editing. There are no separate paragraphs and the misspelled or misinterpreted words remain uncorrected. When the time is taken to write a text, one can structure the way the text will be read and mistakes can be corrected. Whether those be grammatical errors, spelling errors or simply correcting the flow of a sentence.

What is “wrong” in the text? What is “right”?

Other than the missing punctuation, there seems to be missing words, spelling mistakes and incorrect words. The incorrect words are ‘wrong’ because they misrepresent the meaning of the text. For example, “and so they got him thinking about a lot” was actually supposed to be “and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot”.

There are a lot of missing capital letters which would be ‘wrong’, like “Water Lilies” and “The Coronation of Napoleon” which are names of paintings. However, there are other instances where the capital letters are put in the ‘right’ place without it having been specified. For example, “Paris”, “Versailles”, “Monet”, “Louis”, and others.

There were two instances where words were written down correctly from what I dictated, but that would have been considered ‘mistakes’ in written texts. First, Word wrote down “it’s super busy um it’s really beautiful” which, if it were written out and not dictated, the “um” would have been omitted. Second, there were a few places where I made mistakes when telling my story and corrected myself and Word wrote it all down. For example, “money you can also find sorry not money money” was ‘right’ in the sense that I dictated “Manet, you can also find, sorry, not Manet, Monet.”

What are the most common “mistakes” in the text and why do you consider them “mistakes”?

I put the biggest ‘mistakes’ in bold in the text. I consider them mistakes because they change the meaning of what is trying to be expressed. The most common mistakes would be the names of the locations I gave. Many of them are French, so perhaps that is why there was difficulty in writing down those words.

• “the loop” and “the local museum” are supposed to be the Louvre
• “the hue sector” is the Richelieu sector
• “museum else” is Musée d’Orsay
• Some of the “Monet” and “money” is supposed to be Manet while some of the “money” and “monies” is Monet
• “only” is l’Orangerie
• “hotel museum” is the Rodin Museum
• “palace come come clear now” is palace called Grand Trianon
• “sexy girl” is supposed to be Sacré-Coeur
• “various” is Paris

I would also consider some of the missing words to be ‘mistakes’ as they also change the meaning and understanding of the text.

What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?

I believe that a ‘scripted’ story would have helped minimize some of the ‘mistakes’. Firstly, the scripted story would have a more cohesive structure omitting repetition and the audible correction of words. A script would also have stopped me from saying “um” as much as I did as I tend to say that to fill the silence while I think about what to say next. Having a text you read from stops you from doing that. In the ‘scripted’ story, punctuation could have been included for the oral text to help with the flow of the sentences in the written text.

The biggest changes would be in the punctuation and the ‘audible mistakes’. Some of the ‘mistakes’ that would remain would be the missing words I do not pronounce properly, the lack of capital letters, and the unknown French names. Interestingly, in order for the dictated story to make more sense written down, the script would seem to make less sense written down. As Ong stated, one can make their talk sound more like writing only once they have seen writing (Abe Aboud, 2014). In this case, knowing what writing should look like can change the way I speak, when knowing the way the dictation device works. Without having seen this, I would never have known the types of errors that could and would occur.

In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling?

When speaking, we can give ourselves more flexibility when it comes to the numbers of words we use. “Writing is generally done more deliberately than speaking, so finished written pieces are much more carefully crafted than a typical spoken sentence” (Gnanadesiken, 2011, p. 5). Only five minutes of talking got me over 700 words whereas if it were typed out, it would be more concise as “written texts can […] convey their message more precisely” (Gnanadesiken, 2011, p. 5).

In oral storytelling, there is no punctuation that can be seen by the audience, so the storyteller needs to make the emphasis on the key words, speed up or slow down to highlight parts of the story, and add emotion and energy to captivate their audience. When we read a text, the author is not able to use their voice to guide us through the changes of emotion or energy, so they must do that by selecting their words carefully and using punctuation wisely.

Oral storytelling used to be constrained by physical presence. If someone was not in the right place at the right time, they would miss out on the story. When writing came along, it changed our ability to experience things we are not physically there to experience. As Haas (2013) stated, “writing extends human beings’ ability to communicate with others across space and through time (p. 6). Thanks to advances in technology, we have come to a place where oral or visual storytelling can be seen without the constraints of time and space as well, thanks to videos that are now easily access via streaming websites (TedX Talks, 2016).

References

Abe Aboud (2014, September 8). Walter Ong – Oral cultures and early writing. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvF30zFImuo

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011). The First IT Revolution. In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet (pp. 1-10). Wiley-Blackwell.

Haas, C. (2013). The technology question. In Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy (1st ed., pp. 3-23). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203811238

Moore, N. (2016). What’s the point? The role of punctuation in realising information structure in written English. Functional Linguist, 3(6). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40554-016-0029-x

TedX Talks (2016, February 26). Oral tradition in the age of smart phones | Alexander MacDonald|TEDxFulbrightDublin [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egO_46P894k