Dana uses the voice-to-text feature on Google Docs, stating that she picked the platform because it’s the technology that her students use in class. Her initial observations with the Google Doc voice-to-text feature were extremely similar to mine, she says “At first glance, it’s obvious how the text deviates, there are no indents, paragraphs, and few punctuation markings”. The largest challenge Dana encountered was poor grammar and formatting. I also noted in my experience that I found the punctuation to be the largest concern, in my paragraph there were essentially no periods. However, I used the feature as if I had no experience using the tool, which is not the case as I regularly use voice-to-text to rough draft my papers. 

Further, we both take note of the mediation that occurs with writing that does not occur with oral storytelling. Writing can be reformatted, re-written, and re-structured, changing every detail to sound exactly the way the author intends. A person telling a story can easily jump between ideas or instances, whereas in writing, weaving through time requires craft and consideration. When we share our stories we are not confined by the rules of grammar, as Dana notes, “oral language forgoes many of the rules and standards that written language can represent”. 

I think it’s interesting that Dana has included her own experience of her students struggling with literacy and second language learning, stating that they use this application as an assistive technology. Prior to reading her reflection, I had not considered that learners of a second language would be excluded from using this device. Even as a native English speaker, the text-to-speech function was not always correct with my wording, occasionally missing some of my pronouns or propositions. I could see how this function would be especially frustrating for individuals who struggled with pronunciation. I would be interested to do some digging on ESL apps that use speech/voice recording technology to assist with pronunciation, as I would think they are using similar language processing as Google text-to-speech (though I could be very wrong).