Speech to Text Story:

Over the summer, my partner and I went to Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand. Our first stop was in Taipei. In Taipei, we went to the night market every day to xample the local cuisine. We also went on a hike to see the views over Taipei 101. We explored the shopping districts and also the creative park where there were lots of shops and cafes. To highlight. Taipei was the food. We also took a day trip out to Joe Fun and Surfin where we sat paper lanterns. And walked around. The tea shop fill Jofa. In Vietnam, our first stop was Hanoi. Hanoi’s old quarter was very busy and bustling. It had lots of good street food where you sat on the street on a plastic stool and sampled the local cuisine. The food is very cheap and it was very good. From Hanoi, we also took a couple day trips out to Halong Bay and Nimbin. The cruise along Holland Bay was very beautiful. We also got a chance to explore some caves and kayak around Halong Bay In Nimbin, we took a bamboo bow. Down a very picturesque river and went on a hike. To get a great view of the River and Nimbin. We watched a water puppet show in Hanoi and it was very cool to experience that art form. After Hanoi, we went to. Dino. I know was a beach city and we lived right by the beach. One of the days we went out to swim in the water. And we also took a day trip out to Hoyen. Hoyland is known for being a old city. The river there was very pretty. And at night you can write a boat and set lanterns into the river. Daniel also had very good seafood. And great spas. It was a relaxing time when we were there. After Danang, we went to Ho Chi Minh City. We took a day trip to the ******* tunnels, where we got to see the tunnels where the tunnel warfare happened during the Vietnam War. We also got a chance to visit the War Remnant Museum. It was very educational and a very somber place that allowed us to reflect our war. Ho Chi Minh was the busiest city. In Vietnam, from our experience. But they also had good food and we enjoyed our time there. After Ho Chi Minh, we went to Bangkok in Thailand. Bangkok was the busiest city of our trip and the traffic made it very difficult for us to travel around. Due to the traffic, we didn’t do as much as we wanted and we mostly ate at malls since there were lots of options and good food. It was very different compared to malls in North America. We also explore the nightlife in Bangkok. And had a very awesome birthday meal in a Michelin star restaurant. After Bangkok we went N to Chiang Mai. Chum I was a lot less busy than Bangkok and we really enjoyed our time there. The food was good. It was easy to get around. And there were lots of cool temples in Chennai. The highlight. Was going to an elephant sanctuary where we got to feed the elephants and also play in the water with them. After Charmi, we went back to Taipei for a night and flew back to Vancouver. It was a wonderful vacation, although tiring, very fun.  

For this task, I used Word 365’s dictate function for converting speech to text. One of the main deviations I noticed were the run-on sentences. It seems that when we speak and tell a story, sentence structures are less of a focus and the contents of what we are trying to say is the main focus. Another difference I noticed was the importance of grammar. When I was speaking my story, there were some grammatical errors that wouldn’t have occurred if the story was written. The organization of the story was also something that would differ compared to written English. After reviewing the spoken text, although the story followed chronological order, it was lacking in organization. The contents of the story seemed to be all over the place and some parts of the story were repeated.

The speech to text software had the most issues with names of places in Asia. There were times during the story that the place names were transposed correctly. However, most of the time the names were spelled incorrectly or was something else completely. I found that the bigger and better known cities such as Taipei and Ho Chi Minh city were represented correctly in the text. On the other hand, smaller cities such as Hoi An and Da Nang were misspelled quite often possibly due to the words not being in the speech to text database. On top of that, many of the punctuation marks in the story were incorrect. What was meant to be a break in a sentence using a comma turned into a brand new sentence that followed a period. If someone were to read the story, they would’ve gotten the gist of it, but parts of the story would have to be reread for them to understand everything using context clues to overcome the wrongly transposed words and places.

If I had scripted the story ahead of time, I would’ve had talking points for each of the cities we visited and I would’ve gone more into detail in each of the sections for each cities. The story would not have been so brief and there would’ve been more highlights from each of the cities and would be more engaging for a reader to read. Oral storytelling is not only the words a person is saying but also the tone, expressions, and body language of the storyteller. This is often replaced by a broader use of different descriptive vocabulary words in written storytelling to convey similar emotions and meanings to the audience. Written storytelling can also be more accurately passed from person to person and generation to generation. The story stays consistent and the contents are never changed and omitted unless the text is edited. On the other hand, oral stories can have variations when passed from person to person. The story is only stored in the person’s memory and parts could get omitted and changed unknowingly (Gnanadesikan, 2011). However, oral stories are easier to be passed on to another person. As Gnanadesikan (2011) mentioned in their book, “all human society have had language, but many have had no writing.”. For societies and people who did not possess writing and reading literacies, oral storytelling can allow stories to be passed on from person to person. Written storytelling requires a proficient level of both writing and reading literacy which not all societies poses.

References:

Gnanadesikan, A.E. (2011). The first IT revolution. In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet (pp. 1-12). John Wiley & Sons.