My Journey with a Voice-to-Text Story (Task 3)
This week, for maybe the second or third time, I tried using apps that change voice to text (https://speechnotes.co/). Because of this, I decided to share a memory about the first book I prepared and published about thirty years ago. I read the story in simple English into the app. Of course, English is my second language, so some of my pronunciations may not have been clear. The result was very surprising for me. Below, you can see the text that the app created. After that, I will share my thoughts about the text and how the app changed my words. At the end of my post, I will also include the edited version so you can compare and see the differences.
The voice-to-text story feels different from normal written English. It sounds more like someone talking than like something written down. The sentences are long and run together without punctuation, so it’s hard to tell where one idea ends and another begins. Sometimes small words like “the” are missing. There are also grammar mistakes and odd word choices. For example, “library well very strict with big box light Britannica” or “many of their Ray sources” don’t make sense. These are mistakes from the speech-to-text program. In proper writing, sentences would be shorter, the verb tense would stay the same, and the words would be clearer.
Still, the text is not all wrong. There are some problems like run-on sentences, wrong verb forms, misheard words, missing punctuation, and confusing sections. It doesn’t show the tone of voice or body language you’d expect when someone is speaking. But the story itself makes sense. It shows feelings of nostalgia, effort, and pride. The voice feels personal and conversational, which makes it sound like a real person telling their own story. Most importantly, the main ideas still come through. We can see how hard research was before the internet and how much patience and passion it took.
The most common mistakes are easy to spot. The sentences run on because I don’t talk in neat, written chunks. Misheard words happen because the app guesses at sounds and sometimes gets them wrong. Missing words show up because the app often skip little words like “the” or “to” when they talk. Verb tense changes appear because I jump between past and present without noticing. These are considered mistakes because they don’t follow the rules of written English. That makes the text harder to read and less exact.
If the story had been scripted, it would look very different. I made it shorter and easier to read, with correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling. I try to stick the main points like the libraries, the copying rules, the translations, and the handwritten drafts. Also, there wouldn’t be as much repetition or side-tracking. But something would also be lost. The natural emotion of the spoken version might disappear. Oral storytelling has a kind of life and feeling that a scripted version can’t always capture.
This shows how oral storytelling is not the same as written storytelling. Oral stories feel alive because they use tone, pauses, and even body language to make them real. When people talk, they may go off topic, say the same thing again, or switch verb tenses, and that’s okay in speech. But, written stories are different. They need structure, spelling, punctuation, and grammar to make sense. They aim to be clear because the reader can’t hear the voice or see the gestures. Oral storytelling connects with people in the moment. Written storytelling is built to last.
