I used the voice typing tool in Google Docs for this voice-to-text assignment. Below is what this technology captured, unedited, and my analysis of it.
The Story
This past weekend we had my daughter’s birthday party and I think it was a pretty good success we had 10 kids total and the plan was they were going to arrive and come over and do some crafts the first activity that we had was my birthday daughter was greeting all of her guests at the front door and show them where to go in the living room where my other daughter was waiting to teach them how to do origami she had found this really cool this really fun design where if you went to fold it if you hold it one way it’s a dog and then when you flip it to the other side it becomes a cat so that add some variety for people who prefer dogs or cats or most of them both actually once everyone had arrived we moved into the room with the long table and the first activity was painting coasters the reason this was the first one is because they wanted to make sure that the paint had enough time to dry so some of them chose to tape off designs others just did a free paint and yeah with 10 kids it was surprisingly successful not super messy once they finish that we handed out canvas pouches and Sharpie markers and they got to do Sharpie tie-dye canvas pouches and this was really cool I’d meant to look up the kind of scientific properties behind it but not entirely sure if a bunch of 70 girls would be interested in that so instead what we did was just had them colour however they wanted on their canvas pouches with these Sharpies and then once they were done we sprayed it with rubbing alcohol had a little bit of trial and error had a tiny little spray bottle at first and it wasn’t going to work very well so then we move to a larger spray bottle the kind that normally you would have kind of your cleaner in and yeah it works so much better so the trick was definitely to saturate the fabric with the rubbing alcohol and then it was fun right before your eyes you could see the colours melting in matching in the Fine Lines Blurred new colours came about and where created as existing ones Blended together and I think all in all most of them we’re really pleased with it not everyone chose to spray not everyone seemed to understand there was one person who was pretty upset that her design had faded after we sprayed it but yeah I mean that’s quick fix she can go back over on Sharpie and I’ll write her name again whenever she wants so once that was done we figured it was time for a snack we had a rainbow fruit and veggie platter some little pepperoni stick for them to a snack on and variety of juice boxes and then once that was done we did washer necklace is so I picked up some metal washers from the hardware store and got a bunch of nail polish just whatever we had around probably had about 10 or 11 bottles and yeah they just painted the washers and some of them did some cool design some of them just painted it one colour and the whole idea was at once that was painted with nail polish and had dried send they would be able to string it on some kind of a a row port wine that we provided with them they had a choice of colours and then they could add some beans as well so all in all they would have ended up going or the end up going home with her tomorrow call me some coasters canvas bag and and washer necklace the final thing that we have them do was of course we needed to keep with the craft thing so we brought out cupcakes confetti rainbow cupcakes with white icing and then presented those on paint palettes with candy in the 10 different spots for it until they all got to decorate their own cupcake however they wanted with all of the candy or not eating some of the candy on the side or not and yeah it was really fun to see those kinds of designs and I think we were able to get everything done everyone seemed to have a good time and like I said all it all I think it was a success.
The Analysis
The most glaring deviation from written English is that this is one massive run-on paragraph. I don’t use voice-to-text very often in my day-to-day life, so I forgot that one must actually say “comma,” “period,” and “exclamation mark” to add punctuation. It wasn’t until the very end that I remembered this, hence the final period at the end.
Because I was speaking off the top of my head and not from a script, there are a few places where I think the text is wrong, but it could have also been my narration style, such as repeating words (“kind of a a”) and incorrect tenses of words (“so then we move to a larger spray bottle”. However, there are also several places where I am confident the text is incorrect. Examples include “70 girls” (should be “7-year-old girls”) and “row port wine” (should be “rope or twine”). These mistakes remind me of the ‘telephone’ game I played as a kid (and that Gnanadesikan (2008) mentions) where accents, emphases and subtle slurs can make huge differences in whether the receiver correctly interprets the message to pass along. These, and many other blunders in my oral recount of the events, would have been rectified if scripted in advance, as a pre-conceived written version would have been more deliberate and precise (Gnanadesikan, 2008).
These errors could also be a suggestion that I should improve my enunciation, which is something I have noticed deteriorating since 2016 when I left a job that involved lecturing/class facilitating for 5-6 hours each week. If someone had been listening to the story, they may have misheard “beans” for beads but could have either used the context to figure out the proper word or asked for clarification. Similarly, if I were to increase my weekly oral presentation time, I believe some of these words would have been presented more clearly.
The use of technology here has taken what would otherwise be a collection of fleeting sounds and turned it into a visible, permanent record of my daughter’s birthday party. One aspect that I find interesting is that a written recount of this event would not exist had it not been an assignment. Sure, we would have told family and friends about the event, slightly adjusting details and incorporating emotional nuances with each iteration, but it is not something I would have otherwise written down unless I was trying to convey the story to someone I could not speak to directly. This is not because it was an insignificant event (it was my daughter’s first ‘friend’ birthday party, thanks to the timing of COVID); when asked to speak an ‘unscripted’ story, I automatically thought of a personal event that had strong emotions tied to it (joy, pride, exhaustion, love). And yet, none of these emotions seem present when reading the words captured with voice-to-text. Had this been scripted, or intended to be conveyed in written language, I would have included words to express emotions that I know my voice conveyed in the original oral story.
Reference
Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2008).The first IT revolution. In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet (pp. 1-10). John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444304671