I decided to tell the same story, unscripted, in two different speech to text apps. First I would like to address the “right”, “wrong” and mistakes in terms of how each app deciphered what I was saying. Second I would like to touch on the differences between unscripted oral storytelling and written storytelling, regardless of the technology.

Speechnotes:

I’m going to tell the story about how I ended up pursuing a career in education technology so when I was in high school I was very involved with education technologies that our school was kind of piloting as a project put forth by the Quebec government at the time I went to a very small school with a low enrollments so it was easier our school too kind of dowel in these in these projects and these initiatives for changing education in Quebec so it was initiative or project-based learning that was was initiated by the government so we would do these text which involves e-portfolios so I was involved with creating an e-portfolio using PowerPoint I actually attended a conference in Montreal to present these this PowerPoint to present my e-portfolio to group of teachers and from The Province from the English school board so I kind of started this journey early on I also worked on creating a website for my school and had previously not had any type of website and I worked on various projects that involved using very basic technology at the time but using basic Technologies to use in education fast forward a few years when I graduated I actually went to school to study science to study Health Sciences and I bachelor’s in nutritional biochemistry and my masters in global and Community nutrition so this really had nothing to do with education Technologies but I’m it was another path that I have pursued I really enjoyed learning about health and learning about nutrition so it was my kind of my first Passion but when I graduated from my masters at McGill I started working at teaching and learning services within the time where I was waiting for my my thesis to be reviewed you kind of get most off while your thesis is being reviewed so I didn’t have a lot to do with my time so I started working at teaching and learning services open online courses the first one I worked on with an exercise science course and I was hired because of my background in nutrition and health sciences in developing these courses on edx I work closely with an instructor on that and then the next semester I had graduated but I was looking for a job and I continue to work at TLS part-time as a casual employee and ended up working on this nutrition course which was a food-for-thought course and I I worked creating content I worked managing the discussion forums and I worked closely answering students was closely with instructors answering students questions Etc while I was on the job search searching for a job within the nutrition Community I was having a lot of difficulties because I didn’t have my credentials as a dietitian so that was that’s really important to have if you do study nutrition they often will look for your registered dietitian license when hiring so I was I was struggling a lot with finding a job related to nutrition and I started building all of these skills at teaching and learning services that involved building online courses that involves a lot of video editing and and creating videos for recorded lectures I worked in a studio with instructors recording their their lectures and basically took those recordings and created these more sophisticated they could use for their online courses we good at it and while I was at TLS one year turned into two years turned into three years and eventually I decided to ask myself do I keep pursuing looking for a job in the field that I Stay or do I change paths and look for a more permanent position in education technology now after talking to colleagues at McGill I realized that if I wanted to pursue a career in education technology I had to get some asian from I heard acacian institution so some sort of degree which I did not have so if I wanted to be hired as a full-time employee at TLS I needed to get a Masters in Education technology at the very least so point in time where I did make the decision to switch paths I don’t regret I don’t regret the fact that my original path wasn’t nutrition because it did lead me to get that position tLS in the first place where I worked on those nutrition and sports science courses the purpose and it still is very much a passion of mine but when I made that decision to switch career paths and use the skills that I have accumulated over the last three years I decided to look into pursuing another master’s degree in education technology and there was a master’s degree there is a master’s degree offered at Concordia University in Montreal that is a masters of education technology and then there was one at the University of British Columbia that is offered online and my director at teaching and learning Services kind of pushed me qVC because was it a masters of education technology but it had that additional layer of experience of taking a full program online as so to walk away with the same information I would have maybe gotten at Concordia but as an online but the experience with being an online student so that is how I ended up at the University of British Columbia in the masters of education technology and not pursuing my originally set out planned to work in the field of nutrition

The first app I used was Speechnotes. It was relatively easy to use but created an output that did not include punctuation unless I verbally told it to. Since we normally do not speak that way when we tell a story (i.e. “I am going to tell a story period once upon a time”…etc), I didn’t refer to punctuation and let it record my speech as if I were actually talking to someone. The text output was one really long-running sentence. I noticed that when I tried to read it back, I could see how it would be difficult for someone reading it for the first time to extract the true meaning and essence of the story. The lack of punctuation made it feel disorganized and made it difficult to establish a linear storyline like you normally would in a written story. Even in academic writing, there may be no storyline per se, but there is structure. Though I intended for there to be structure in my story, I felt that it was lost when I told it unscripted.

Another common mistake I noticed was misunderstanding or completely leaving out words I said. For example, “dowel” was interpreted from “dabble”, I’m was interpreted from “um” and “qVC” was interpreted from “to UBC”. There were even certain words the app got wrong that I was unable to interpret: “some asian from I heard acacian”. I also noticed that a lot of words were missing. This was perhaps due to my pronunciation, which may be different from what the app is programmed to understand, or because I spoke too quickly or too softly at certain points. For example, at the end of sentences, I tend to speak the last word or two softer than the rest. I think if I had scripted the story and read that script out loud, Speechnotes would still make some of these errors in the text. It would continue to lack punctuation and there may still be misunderstandings of words based on how I spoke them.

Finally, I was confused by what the app decided to capitalize and what it did not. There were many randomly capitalized words. For example, the first time it capitalized TLS, which is correct,  but the second time it only capitalized the L, giving an output of tLs. It did capitalize all names (like Quebec, Montreal and McGill) but it also capitalized nouns and verbs in mid-sentence (like The Province, Community and Technologies).

I personally would not use this type of app again for creating a speech-to-text activity. It was very difficult to decipher.

Otter:

Okay, so I’m going to tell the story about how I ended up pursuing a career in education technology.

So when I was in high school, our school took part in this education project based learning initiative that was put out by the Quebec, government, where they would get students to do more project based learning exercises. So one of the things that I had to do. This was in grade eight was create an E portfolio using PowerPoint, so I had to create a portfolio going through various work that I had done it didn’t have to be specific to a course. Though I believe we did do one specific to math, but we did a general e portfolio, answering questions, perhaps, for example like an assignment that I had an proved on or an assignment that I found difficult etc.

And we ended up, presenting this E portfolio these e portfolios. At a conference in Montreal to teachers from around Quebec.

I was also involved in creating a website for my school previously that they had had no type of website of any kind, and I was really heavily involved with just doing different projects and activities that involved.

Learning Technologies, or technology in general.

So that’s my starting point. Now fast forward a few years when I graduated, I ended up going to McGill to study nutrition I did my bachelor’s in nutritional biochemistry and I did my masters in global and community nutrition. So nutrition was my main passion was really what I wanted to pursue a career in at the start of my young adult life. I finished writing my thesis, and was waiting to have it reviewed, which takes about a semester so during that time I didn’t have a whole lot to do so I applied for a job at the Teaching and Learning Services at McGill where I got hired to be a course assistant for a massive open online course with edX. For a Sport Science course initially I was hired because of my background in nutrition.

And so I worked very closely with the instructor to develop this course and run it, I was the moderator of the discussions, I answered all of the students questions I helped manage the assignments, etc.

The next semester.

Teaching and Learning services offered another MOOC which was a nutrition side, sorry and nutrition MOOC. So I was very interested in helping them work and deliver this course on edX. So I stayed with them as a casual employee, part time, I was graduated at that point, but I really enjoyed working on these MOOCs and working on a course that was relevant to my background so while I looked for another job in the field of nutrition, I stayed at TLS working on online courses. And one thing kind of led to another the courses were offered and re offered. And I ended up working at TLS for three years on these MOOCs and on various other projects that end tasks I was given at the time.

So, it came to a point where I was struggling to find a job in my field of nutrition, because I didn’t have my dietetics credential, my Registered Dietitian license it was very difficult to find a job or the job that I was looking for. So it came to a point where I had to make a decision of whether I was going to continue pursuing my, my job in nutrition.

Sorry, where I was going to continue pursuing my career path in nutrition, or if I was going to switch career paths and start using the experience that I built up at Teaching and Learning Services and pursue a career path in education technology.

But before I was able to apply for a full time position, more permanent position at TLS. It was kind of implied that I really needed to have some sort of educational academic background foundation for education technology with, which most of my colleagues had.

So this is what led me to apply to UBC in the MIT program, and switch gears from nutrition to start pursuing education technology.

One of the things that I had question was, Do I regret not pursuing the field in which I had originally set out to pursue which was nutrition.

And looking back at my younger years when I was still in high school, I can still say that I had had interest in this field without even realizing it. Early on, so that’s why I linked back to my, my experiences in high school so that I can kind of validate that this was another passion of mine that I probably had not yet acknowledged and further to that. I believe that my degrees in nutrition are what originally landed me the job at Teaching and Learning Services working on the online courses on the nutrition courses on edX. And so, of course, it was not a waste because if I hadn’t have had followed that initial path I would have never it would have never led led me to getting more interested and focused on my journey with education technology.

So that’s my story. That’s how I ended up from a degree in a master’s in science to a master’s in education technology at UBC.

The second app I used was Otter which is a more sophisticated application. It recorded punctuation based on the length of the pauses I took when I was speaking. It also recorded my speech in a more transcript type structure. I could see how long it took me to say every sentence. This was very interesting as I made it much easier to read and follow in comparison to Speechnotes. It attempted to establish some structure to my story and used the pauses to reflect a new thought. With that said, there were still many mistakes made with punctuation. When telling a story unscripted, we might pause for a second to gather our thoughts or to remember a detail. This doesn’t always mean that it is the end of a sentence or the end of a thought. Therefore I can see many sentences ending when they shouldn’t have. I can also see entirely different paragraphs started when I paused to carefully tell my story. This might vary from person to person. I am generally a slower talker. Words don’t always flow easily for me and so I take a lot of pauses to try and say exactly what I want to say. This cadence and tone are not reflected in the text in a meaningful way. If you were to listen to the story in person, it might be more captivating and make more sense to hear than when it is to read.

The general conventions of English include grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization and paragraphing. All 5 of these conventions were lost in some manner in both speech-to-text apps I tried. Spelling was typically the most correct while punctuation, capitalization and paragraphing were the least. Grammar is an interesting convention because it depends on my choice of words and sentence structure and less on the app itself. This exercise has demonstrated that, in general, my grammar in oral communication is weaker than my written grammar.

Regardless of the app, there are major differences between the way I would orally tell my story, unscripted, from the way I might write it, scripted. Firstly, the way I speak differs greatly from the way I write, especially in a formal setting. Writing allows me to organize my thoughts in a more structured and standardized way. It forces me to use the conventions of English. It also allows me to communicate in a more complex way. There tends to be more repetition when speaking than when a story is written. This is something I noticed in both versions of my story. I tended to repeat certain sentences, sometimes adapting them to reflect what I wanted or meant to say. Additionally, I am unhappy with the structure of the story. It does not always accurately communicate what I was trying to convey. I feel like there were moments of rambling which can be common when speaking unscripted. If I scripted the story, I would take the time to reflect on exactly what words I wanted to use. It would also give me the time to review and edit to change words, sentences or paragraphs until I was satisfied with them. Unscripted communication does not foster this type of review.

It was interesting to tell the story through two different applications. It was the same story with the same general facts and thoughts, however, you can see that they are quite different. Some details were included in one and not the other. I think this is an interesting reflection on how stories might change when we repeat them verbally. As Gnanadesikan (2011) used the “telephone” party game to illustrate the way a story might change when told orally over time, I think I have demonstrated it with just myself in a relatively short period of time. One thing to point out here is that I was the only one telling my own story. I imagine if the story was told again and again by others, it might change significantly over time. This is a major difference between written storytelling and oral storytelling. Again, as Gnanadesikan (2011) opens “The First IT Revolution” with, “This sentence is a time machine. I wrote it a long time before you opened
this book and read it. Yet here are my words after all this time, pristinely preserved, as good as new.” A written story is truly a snapshot in time and will remain the same forever.

Considering Ong’s (1982) work, if we were existing in a primarily oral culture and I wanted to tell the same story as I did above in a way that was consistent and that could be passed on overtime, I would have to make some major adaptations. Most importantly, it would have to be scripted and structured in a form that was memorable in what Ong (1982, p.34) describes as “mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence”. Since this activity was meant to be unscripted, it demonstrates that this type of storytelling could not exist in a primarily oral culture. The exact story could not live beyond the moment it was told.

Another point I considered was that written storytelling gives room for an element of interpretation and imagination by the reader. They can read the story and hear whatever voice they choose to hear. In oral storytelling, the storyteller is that voice and therefore requires some level of skill to be animated, emotional and captivating so that they convey the essence of the story for the listener. To the one receiving the story, listening is more passive than reading. The storyteller is painting the picture with their voice. I’ve come to realize that I am not a skilled unscripted oral storyteller. I know that if I were to listen to the audio of my story I would sound monotone and likely like I was just trying to get through it as best as I could. It would lack emotion and variations in tone and therefore I feel like it would not be captivating. However, I also realize that this activity may not accurately reflect how a story may be told to an audience. Recording ourselves talking, unscripted, by ourselves, is likely not how we tell a story to a friend or family member who is listening and reacting. Unless we are skilled actors, there will be more emotion present when we are speaking to an actual person. I believe, more animation and emotion would create a more vibrant story which would better communicate what I was orally trying to convey. This is lost in the speech-to-text transcription.

This activity was very eye-opening as it made me evaluate how exceptionally different oral communication (especially when unscripted) differs from written communication. It also demonstrates how much meaning and essence can be lost in using speech-to-text applications to transcribe and oral story to text, concluding that there are still many human elements to orality that cannot be captured by technology.

References:

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011).“The First IT Revolution.” In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet“. (Vol. 25). John Wiley & Sons. (pp. 1-10).

Ong, W. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London and New York: Taylor and Francis Group.