Task 3

Voice-to-Text Technology

The premise of this week’s task was to use a voice-to-text technology to transform a story told with oral language into material text and to discuss and analyze the outcome. To complete this task, I selected Google Docs and its Voice Typing feature, was able to practice using the technology after reading this week’s course texts to take notes on what I had highlighted and to see how accurately my speech would be captured and transformed into written text. I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised with the results and how well my voice was captured, because I have some issues with enunciation sometimes and can get mumblemouthed; I often have a difficult time with Siri when I send voice-to-text text messages and prefer typing to my language input being misinterpreted and mangled. I was impressed with how some lesson common words such as authors’ last names were captured and processed to accurately come out as Eric Havelock and Walter Ong.

As I spoke, I could see my words appear on the screen in real time and dots to indicate Google was working to transcribe them, but after pausing, I noticed whole lines of the voice-to-text reverting back to dots to indicate a second round of processing was occurring. I assume this is part of the technology’s AI process of matching text against all of Google’s data for a more intelligent transcription, which is why the names Eric Havelock and Walter Ong’s names ended up perfectly spelled, though I didn’t have the same luck with the names Jack Goody and Ian Watt probably because of my poor enunciation, but I digress. The following is my unscripted, unedited personal narrative about gardening told orally and captured with Google Docs’ Voice typing feature. Inspired by Gnanadesikan (2009), I introduce my story with the following quote:

Writing takes words and turns them into objects, visible or tangible. Written down, words remain on the page like butterflies stuck onto boards with pins. They can be examined, analyzed, and dissected. Spoken words, by contrast, are inherently ephemeral.

and an accompanying word cloud image in the shape of a butterfly created at https://www.wordclouds.com/

Enjoy.

I started gardening when I move to Toronto which is a little bit Ironic considering that there’s a lot more land to Garden on in Texas but when I live there I live in Austin with roommates in apartments and really didn’t have my own space where I can grow things I declared myself to have a green thumb because I would kill any indoor plant that was given to me or that I purchased So eventually I just stopped buying them one of the things that it’s funny about growing plants indoors is that everybody over Waters them constantly and that’s what causes their death death by love and overwatering that first year in Toronto I grew tomatoes peppers basil planted some flowers like Marigold and has some peas growing up a trellis in the backyard we didn’t have much space and I had to lay down some cardboard and build a raised bed to make it happen but eventually the second year I used up a lot more space by making more red raised beds I really got into gardening do when we moved from Toronto to Niagara so I can go to school in the greenhouse technician program that’s when they really took off a lot of methods and the science behind growing and so that’s giving me the confidence to do what I do at my own home I’m really into native gardening as well as vegetable gardening and I really like growing weird vegetables but then sometimes it takes an effort to figure out what to do with them in the kitchen but my interest in gardening kind of stems from my interest in eating food and then learning how to cook food I like to eat at home as opposed to going out all the time now the focus has shifted a bit from gardening just for vegetables and herbs to planting a lot more native plants to attract pollinators and birds to the garden I really enjoyed this winter watching all of the birds come to the yard and eat from the feeders but also take away the seeds leftover on the plants that I didn’t clean up when they all died in the fall and early winter things like native Ironwood Woodland sunflowers echinacea and ask her little birds like juntos and sparrows are constantly picking at the ground and flying under the feeder to pick up the scraps of what’s left over that dropped but then they migrate toward those plants it really makes me happy that all these efforts are not being wasted in the summer it’s a particularly enjoyable for me to watch the bees and the butterflies and even lesser-known pollinators such a wise and beetles land on the flowers and is it a wide variety of plants need it or not it’s still pretty cool to see one plant that really kind of shocked me as far as having a lot of different diversity of pollinators visit it was still little native bees wasps swallowtail butterflies that lay their eggs on it visited the dill and I just couldn’t bear 2 remove it from the garden when it was really time to do so so in the spring I think I’ll have a lot of different little tail plants popping out from where it all went to seed and dispersed All Over the Garden The spring am starting more native plants by sowing the seeds while it’s still cold so they undergo the cold stratification. They need to pop up in the spring so things like golden Alexander and pearly Everlasting which are two flowers that are native and attract different native butterflies Elsa want to find my peppers and tomatoes this year even though I know how to start them because I really find that greenhouse-grown tomatoes and peppers do a lot better in the garden the ones I try to start indoors myself I’ll probably start some herbs and some brassicas like kale and brussel sprouts so I really haven’t had much success with the brussel sprouts last year when I started spinach and various lettuce says they did pretty well when I transplant them into the garden so I plan on doing that again I’ll direct sow some peas carrots beets radishes and other root vegetables probably a couple weeks before the frost date comes in May so that they give a little bit of a head start and I think I’ll do the same with lettuce as well since there really is a short. Of time in the spring you can grow it before it gets too hot in the summer in the weather starts to bolt or try to flower and become bitterThe other thing I want to do is correct a misstep I made last year when I planted some of my flowering plants on the bottom level of my garden the red plants like red cardinal flower and salvia against which is pineapple sage attracts hummingbirds what was the use of planting them far away in the garden and not being able to actually see the hummingbirds when they come to visit

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The goal of this task is to examine the differences in language patterns between oral and written language, and as an English and Communications instructor, there are a few things that stand out to me.

The spoken story is an unscripted and otherwise unedited work that was composed extemporaneously resulting in a stream-of-consciousness style text. From a writer’s perspective, there’s a lot of room for improvement especially in terms of focus and organization, which can make or break the quality of a written text. The output of my language became one big and heavy block of text, with absolutely no punctuation to frame words into meaningful sentences or separate sentences into organized paragraphs. I’m actually quite perturbed by the result.

In speaking, an author can read the room to adapt storytelling for the audience in ways that can’t occur in written text, and in this case, when the story is being dictated to a device that cannot indicate confusion or boredom or any other emotion that might drive the speaker to adapt their language in real time. And the flow from one sentence to another and cohesiveness may be considered weak in written text but might be more tolerable in the context of orality.

Haas (2013) poses the technology question: “What does it mean for language to become material?” and extends the question with a follow-up: “What is the nature of computer technologies and what is their impact on writing?”

When oral language becomes material such as in this task, the expectations of written text are immediately imposed upon it, and it becomes difficult to ignore the lack of writing conventions, particularly punctuation. The voice-to-text technology does not appropriately capture punctuation unless it is spoken aloud, which would have required me to familiarize myself with proper pronunciation commands, which I did not do. Upon reviewing the story, I see that when I said the word “period” a few times when speaking to indicate a period of time, that commanded the voice-to-text technology to create punctuation instead of the word “period.” The computer technology knows to exclude filler words such as “ummmm,” which I caught myself using a few times, even thought I was moderating my speech and would pause entirely in lieu of using filler words, which would be natural in oral storytelling.

The voice-to-text technology also chose to capitalize certain words that shouldn’t have been capitalized, and I wish I had an audio recording to match up with the voice-to-text writing to compare the two. When I said “where it all went to seed and dispersed All Over the Garden” did I put some sort of stress on the words all over the garden to indicate to voice-to-text that those words should be capitalized? I’m not sure.

Schmandt-Besserat & Erard (2009) refer to the advancement of technology and ways of writing, and in 2021, the technology allows for fairly accurate written output of oral input. Most of my grievances with the output are likely due to user error, or at least my unawareness of the language to use or ways of speaking that would produce all of the missing conventions of written English. But if I have to break up my storytelling with punctuation commands, my thinking is disrupted, and I’m not telling the story the same way I would without this type of moderation. With an increasing number of people giving technology more oral input, I foresee natural language processing advancing rapidly and voice-to-text technology creating more written output that mimics the qualities and intentions attached to our spoken language that translate to conventional written language.

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References

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2009). The First IT Revolution. In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet (pp 1-12). John Wiley & Sons. doi: 10.1002/9781444304671

Haas, C. (2013). The Technology Question. In Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy(pp. 3-23). Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9780203811238

Schmandt-Besserat, D. (2009). Origins and Forms of Writing. In Bazerman, C. (Ed.) Handbook of research on writing: History, society, school, individual, text. Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781410616470