The story of me trying to do the voice to text task
Hello the test can you hear me okay I think this is working on so this is the speech-to-text task I don’t know what kind of story of his hell and I’ve just spent like the last I want to say 3 minutes going through like kind of through Google to see it looking up Converse and then I was like in my head going through each of these options thinking oh I feel like I’m just going to start like I feel like I’m just going to go through these and then I’ll think of things all start rehearsing in my head which is not the point of this task it should be as live and free and the way you would regularly tell the story so I decided to make my story the story of me trying to tell a story so I was just looking through just I just Googled conversation starters in each of the questions and then I realize whenever I looked at a question I would just start rehearsing my answer in my head and then yeah that’s not the way this talk is going to be so I guess how I would tell the story to do this task I’d like to make it the story of how I’m going to tell you a story for like 5 minutes might be a bit more effective though I don’t know if that’s actually going to be the case one of the questions that out to me was like tell me about what are your dreams and then I thought this is a question and I want to use this and to tell my story about cake I had a dream about cake I think once two weeks ago but the problem is not is that I’ve actually told the story before like this past Monday I feel like I kind of counts as rehearsal so I didn’t want to choose that as an option I just kept scrolling through the list and scrolling and scrolling and I could see questions like what do you like to watch on Netflix and I don’t have Netflix and I realize a lot of these questions revolve around pop culture and what people would normally do and I realized I’m just really obsessed with work and all I ever do is study and work and I just think I’m super boring that way it’s not getting to that because I think I’ll just end up talking a lot about work instead and I don’t want to do that because it’s also feels scripted because I keep talking about it I think I’m really struggling with that idea of like making a story or just talking freely because it’s not something I have done in a while ever since like of course the current trend out loud as much which is really weird and I can normally be a very chatty person once you get to know me just noticed that I’m angry all the time complain a lot I know this that when I back when we used to be in the office there’s this person who always is in the staff Lounge out of goats 8 a.m. in the morning I will make it on to campus I actually start work at 9 but I like to get there early to come there to get my first cup of tea in the morning and then like we would greet each other I really don’t know who I am I’m horrible with figure out people’s names and I just don’t ask them and then just wait until someone other day when that’s all over their name anyway so one morning you saw me and I think I was either washing my dishes or I was on my way out the door and he said so ID complaints today every time I talk to this guy I am always complaining about something so I think this is just a lot of I don’t know the way I talk normally is full of complaints that I’m just projecting a inner anger all the time which is not super healthy but it was kind of amusing and I do find it funny yeah so I think I originally started doing this to tell you the story of cake but it is kind of hers I have told the story of or of my dream about cake twice it’s all that wants to my boyfriend and then once to two of my former colleagues we were catching up on Monday at 9 so nice to talk to people again cuz I find that during this pandemic I don’t speak English as much so feels kind of weird that way as I speak I keep interrupting myself and I know I’m doing that and there’s always other ideas and things that I want to say but I’m not but like I should stop and just tell you the story about cake before my 5 minutes are up pre pandemic I want to say March 12th I was planning on going to my friend’s birthday party and I was going to order a cake for her and obviously that didn’t happen but it was important to me my screen important to me because I really wanted to buy her a cake for her birthday and since it didn’t happen I started thinking about cake recently I guess cuz my dream feels like a few weeks ago and was just as weird dream I guess all my dreams are really weird and Vivid where I was in the Hudson’s Bay in square one which is a mall in the city I live in which is not a place where you would buy Momofuku cake because you’d buy Momofuku cake at Momofuku I was buying the cake in the jewellery department and then they’re like yeah we’ll get this cake for you and then I walked into Topshop which is it is actually connected to the Hudson Bay and suero on and then somehow when I bought this shirt which I was like this is the wrong size i’m going to catch the next year and I said this is the perfect size it was the same size as the other should have had just picked up just so weird anyways then I went back into the Hudson’s Bay and they were cupcakes that they gave me two huge platter of cupcakes which I would say maybe there were 10 cupcakes on each plate and then this third plate of fruit and fruits on it and then I just said he’s so totally not what Momofuku cake looks like another start stacking the cakes on top of each other and they squish them all and they decided this is wrong like cupcakes and does a bag and then poured the fruit juice all over it and that was the cake then somehow I went down the and I was somehow in I guess downtown Toronto on donated the cakes at a homeless shelter and then I woke up anyway so that was rather this is the story of me trying to tell you a story
How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?
This isn’t the worst speech-to-text I’ve done so I am impressed. When I use Camtasia’s auto-captioning tool, somehow everything I say becomes extremely political.
Unlike written English, this transcript has NO punctuation. Everything is a giant run-on sentence which makes it hard to identify where one idea starts and another one ends.
What is “wrong” in the text? What is “right”?
I used speechnotes to complete this task and its transcription was not…perfect. In hindsight, I realized I should have made an audio recording of myself to compare it to the transcript!
The software didn’t do well in capturing some of the words I used and this may have been because I speak relatively quickly and there were fluctuations in my voice as I was speaking.
I am impressed that speechnotes was able to get most of the words correct and even uses correct punctuation for words like “Google”, “Momofuku”, “Hudson Bay”, and “Topshop”.
What are the most common “mistakes” in the text and why do you consider them “mistakes”?
The text doesn’t capture my laughter, which I think is interesting. There were several points in my story where I laugh, but you don’t see it captured. Although I don’t know how speechnotes would transcribe this ([laughter]? hahahahaha? hahahHAHAHahaha?) it takes away from the conversational aspects of my story.
In terms of my text, I engage in A LOT of topic switching which makes the story hard to follow.
What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?
I purposefully chose the topic of the story of me telling this story because it would force me to be unscripted. It had to be an ad lib experience. In the story, you might see some remnants of me explaining that I would immediately start rehearsing my response.
A scripted story would be much more organized. A lot of the filler words, rambling, and jumping back and forth between topics would be removed. I know this is what would happen because I’ve experienced it when I used to work at a start up to make video lessons. As a result of that time, I try to always script myself and rehearse what I want to say so that it’s polished.
Side story: At the start up, the CEO told me to teach the way I would in the classroom and be unscripted. He said it was an experiment. Although I would arrange my audio tracks for the video composition, he was not happy with the end product.
The Creative Director told me that I was always interrupting myself. Although he enjoyed these asides, it wasn’t appropriate for the medium. Video is unforgiving and viewers don’t want to listen to a meandering lesson. From that moment onwards, I started scripting myself. I would physically write out my lesson “speech” and then revise it for flow and organization.
In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling?
Oral storytelling can be a more intimate experience because you can use body language and listen to the voice of the storyteller. Although there may be jumping back and forth between topics, you can always engage in conversation to backtrack. Depending on the storyteller and audience, the story can change. Each re-telling is unique.
Written storytelling is usually more polished. The text is more organized and may include more words to construct the setting. Although this might also be done in oral storytelling, the additional words are required to model an oral storyteller’s body language and voice. Everything in a written story needs clarity because the audience can’t go back to the storyteller to get clarification. The text is constant unless there are future revisions.
Hi Linda, I really like your idea (although only in hindsight) of recording oneself as one spoke this task because it would indeed have been interesting to hear and read the content. It is indeed interesting that laughter was not picked up and I wonder if this is linked to the application you used or not as mine picked up every time I used “uhm” and “uh”. I also wonder how much these speech-to-text applications vary and differ between accents and if there is somewhere to set ones accent, because the application I used definitely made several errors in my word choice, which were quite entertaining but also made me realise I can’t remember what I said.
Your “story” is very evident of the stream of consciousness as you jumped around quite a bit and had many differing ideas all somehow linking but also not – I noticed this in mine too but in yours it was so much more evident.
Thanks for sharing.
Hi Linda!
I was also impressed that the Apple app I used picked up on most of the proper nouns I used in my story.
Thanks for sharing!
Robin