My Story

This is a story about my new house 10 years ago my parents moved this neighbourhood and it was love at first sight and I was bummed that it wasn’t the ones my parents had purchaseda few years later it did go on the market but unfortunately I was in the middle of my undergrad and couldn’t possibly buy it myself at that time jump ahead to the summer of 2017 when the wildfires hit the Cariboo chilcotin this neighbourhood was the first in the northern Caribou area to burn three houses were lost two of which are right across the street from my new house I was there for most of it I’m at my parents house my dad and I were fighting bushfires grass fires root fires and watering our neighbours gardens it was a very strange time because while we could legally be home during the evacuation order we could not return if we left the property otherwise we would be charged with insanity dad and I especially took care of this house because it was my dream home whether or not I would ever get to live in it jump ahead 2 after the fires when I met the previous owners and jokingly said to them that if they wanted to move away for retirement to let me know because I I would love to buy their houseturns out they were planning to retire sooner rather than later and they gave us a timeline of about 5 years which was shortened to a year which was shortened to a matter of months we got to go inside for the first time in October and it was eerie because it’s floor plan was identical to every dreamhome I ever built for myself in The Sims miraculously my partner and I were able to raise the down payment and actually get a mortgage and now we’re here and it’s crazy and I’m so overwhelmingly I know it’s corny but I’m so overwhelmingly blessed I can stand on my porch and if I was a good spitter and the wind was blowing in the right direction I would be able to spit on the the tree that is half burnt so not only am I lucky that I get to live in this beautiful home with its beautiful views I’m lucky that this house is even still standingand part of that luck is self-made because I stayed when so many others left the Caribbean I helped protect this house and others in this neighbourhood PS I was raised with fire training and my dad was certified by the US Navy to fight fires and had been a bushfire volunteer for decades I understand that people with less fire knowledge felt safer following the evacuation order and leaving for Prince George in Kamloops during the 2017 wildfires

– Recorded using Google Keyboard’s Voice-to-Text button

Analysis & Reflection

You likely noticed that my text has a glaring deviation from conventionally written English—there is no punctuation. It’s like reading something by James Joyce (albeit with far more “and”s). It is utterly without any markers to signify pacing… or emphasis. These are things that Google’s voice-to-text algorithm cannot interpret (yet).

It got some other things “wrong” too. Contrary to grammar-rules, numbers under 10 were written as digits, rather than spelled out. Sometimes it recorded “2” instead of “to”, or “in” instead of “and”. Occasionally there is no space between words, which was a result of the tool stopping while I was speaking. However, it almost always recorded “it’s” and “its” correctly, so it seems to have the ability to interpret context. It also correctly capitalized place names (except for “chilcotin”) and acronyms (“PS” and “US”).

The most common mistake was misspelling Cariboo. The algorithm actually got it correct once—when it was followed by its sister region, Chilcotin. Unsurprisingly, when mentioned alone it would record “Caribou” (the animal), and when followed by an “and” it would record “Caribbean” (likely due to how I breathed between the two words).

Dictating to my phone fluctuated between convenient and cumbersome, with very little in-between. In some ways, it took less time to tell my story than it would have to write it down. It was essentially running thought-to-speech. Ironic, since I would have crafted a much smoother narrative had I scripted ahead of time. I often edit as I write, correcting errors (such as my stuttered “I I”) and reading passages aloud to myself to feel its flow. Having a script would also have saved me from the frequent interruptions to my thought process! More than once I needed to repeat a large chunk of the story because the tool had simply stopped listening.

Voice-to-text can be a useful technology for those who, whether by ability or circumstance, cannot write. I sometimes use it to blindly send a text when I cannot look at or physically use my phone. A student could use it to record their own stories and other written assignments. Depending on their educator’s expectations, they may need to do a great deal of editing afterward. Whether voice-to-text technology is being used for convenience or capability, however, it is not the same as oral storytelling.

Oral storytelling has many advantages that make it different from writing. Storytellers can use non-verbal communication, such as gestures, expressions, and movement to captivate and entertain their audience. Like Christine De Luca, they can vary their intonation, raise or lower their volume, and even switch dialects. Writers must literally spell out these things. For example, Brian Jacques wrote a variety of English dialects in his children’s series Redwall. Google’s voice-to-text technology is not capable of translating these oral storytelling techniques (yet). By dictating to a device that cannot interpret emotion, or give its own responses as an audience, voice-to-speech is more akin to writing with a magical pencil than to oral storytelling.

In 2015, I was in TRU’s Indigenous Literature course, and we explored oral storytelling a great deal. Much of an oral storyteller’s skill stems from their ability to read and respond to their audience. For example, in Netflix’s Locke and Key, the three siblings recall how their father told them the same bedtime story. He paid attention to their reactions and tailored the story to each individual child. In this way, oral stories are more flexible than written stories—where the best you can do is skip ahead, as the Grandfather does while reading the “kissing part” to his Grandson in The Princess Bride. According to Chris Bose, a poet of the N’laka’pamux (pronounced ng-khla-kap-mh) Nation, who made a series of videos for my old Indigenous Lit. course, stories need an audience to come alive.

I miss teaching my students face-to-face. I miss the “dance” of sharing stories with them. In the past two months, I have made several videos to facilitate asynchronous learning. You can still spin a yarn while your audience sits in your imagination, watching you through the lens of a camera. Despite the text being spoken, rather than written, I still find I use the same editing-as-I-go process while filming. A lesson that would take twenty minutes takes me several hours to film a video that is less than ten minutes long. Everything you say has to be measured, concise, and enunciated. Like writing, once it’s published it’s fixed. This is not oral storytelling. It’s not fluid, or adaptable to the reactions of my audience. Instead of feeling recharged by receiving the reciprocal energy, I feel drained by performing for the Void.