I was immediately drawn to Agnes’ voice to text story because it is all about moving from Ontario to Saskatchewan. I have lived in Saskatchewan my whole life and was excited to read about the perspective of someone who hasn’t always been here. I was so happy to hear about her experiences with the sunrises, sunsets, and distant horizon in the Land of Living Skies. I really think the skies are one of the highlights of the province, and sometimes I take it for granted. A few years ago, I participated in a science outreach program in a small town southeast of Saskatoon. One of the other volunteers was a new international M.Sc. candidate at our university and had just come to Saskatchewan the week before. Despite the minus 30 C weather, he asked more than once to pull over on the highway during our long drive to photograph the sky. It was then that I remembered just how lucky I am to see it all the time!
Agnes used the voice to text tool embedded in Google Docs, whereas I chose to use Speechnotes. It seems that we had similar experiences with the output generated by the technology as we both noted a lack of punctuation and inappropriate capitalization of words. In my story, the word “Garden” was capitalized multiple times and in Agnes’ story the words “Farmland” and “Community” were capitalized as well. I wonder if the technologies picked up on a certain cadence in our voices or some other subtle nuance in our speech patterns to decide that those words sounded like proper nouns. I got the impression that we both spoke a bit unnaturally while dictating to the laptop, which might have had an effect.
Link to Agnes’ Voice to Text Story
Thanks for sharing your story, Agnes! I enjoyed reading it.