My Voice-to-Text story:
Okay for my task 3.4 I’m going to tell the story of when I was hit in the face with a plane propeller often when I tell people about this there’ll be very surprised and wonder how in the world am I still surviving until they realize I must be talking about and model plane propeller I’m hanging out with some friends of mine and we wandered over to a buddies house now he was an absolute whiz when it came to designing and building his own model airplanes have this one new words and cut the throttle so it pretty much copper in the air now this is before drones became super popular and what I was able to do as I could walk over to the plane and take it right out of the air and then throw it like a paper airplane you can just keep flying to it would launch out of my hand we’re a little competitive with this where he would try to have read it right in front of me and then as I went to gravity might slowly dart out of the way and one time I reach forward and grabbed it near the tail section so when he comes the throttle it actually pivoted in my hand and it was crazy because in that moment in my memory of it is I remember seeing the propeller spinning sword in slow motion just coming towards my face as it’s doing that I’m just thinking oh no next thing I know sore on my nose and it’s Ella’s if it bounced off the bridge of my nose in the moments after I remember the one I thought I had was thank goodness hit my eyes I’ve always had a phobia of of of losing my eyesight so as soon as I realized that it hadn’t hit my eyes I had this huge wave of release I look over to my buddy just to be like I’m okay and I look at him and his face was white as a sheet is forward and grabs my nose and it’s just squeeze in a tight end as. My head back I just thought maybe I’m not alright or I’m not okay it didn’t help that my girlfriend at the time was incredibly squeamish hated the sight of blood so apparently my nose is Fountain and everyone around started panicking and oddly enough I think it helps that I was relieved that my eyes are fine I wasn’t going into shock I was fairly calm so I got to start organizing people so I asked one person to go call my mom so she could take me to the hospital I asked them to another to get exhaust from the kitchen and then I coordinated with my buddy let’s swap so on free you will release my nose and I will grab instead that way you don’t have to walk around dragging you guide my nose every when he when we arrange that I saw that his hand was really really red but I didn’t get a good look at it because I was busy holding my nose when they finally brought me a rag I swap it out and it looked as if my hand has been dipped in like a cranberry coloured paint it was just such vibrant glad I have not seen that I hadn’t seen that before anyway so I finally move inside and I’m keeping my head back trying to staunch the flow of blood and I get handed a phone to contact her to talk my mom and I try to explain to her mom might have been acting like I’ve been hit in the face with a model plane I need you to take me to the hospital for stitches and her response was no you’re making this up I don’t believe you and she hung up on me I couldn’t believe it I think there’s definitely been a few times I’ve I’ve messed with her and she thought I was dialling me up at this point so have to call her again cacophony of voices in the background reinforcing my claim that I was hurt so I finally convinced her so she shows up and take him to the hospital sitting in setting but was really annoying actually was the bleeding had largely stock so I walked in and it didn’t look that severe so I was pretty low on the triage list and because of that we we I think it was probably around midnight that I actually was seen by a doctor and they decide they had to put stitches in now fortunately for me the doctor on the floor at the that evening was was trained for plastic surgery because normally I get these big sick release cars and I wasn’t looking I was looking forward to having these big scars across my nose but he did he did a great job the one the one last element of the story that was a little chill amount of free required because normally I don’t freeze very well on my on the left side of my face not sure why it’s always been that way so he starts touching up the right side of my nose in his work his way over actually the first time they put in the freezing because there’s no because there are no blood vessels in the nose at South are simply cup Hillary’s they had to injects the freezing at the base of my nose into access that they put two needles from my upper gums injected in in through there and then they did another two needles one on either side of my eye under the skin feels like needles are scraping along the fascia or the bone of my skull has to be one of my least favourite experiences of my lifetime so I absolutely hate again this fear of losing my eyesight check me some thrashing it was so uncomfortable so he stitching up the right side of my nose and works as we were laughing I start feeling it because again the left side of my face doesn’t freeze well and I thought I would I would rather take the pain then get to get more freezing done but it just got to the point where it’s like you know what this I have to do something so I mention that I could feel it so they put in another to another two injections fortunately these were these went through the gums rather than scraping down my face through my eye which was very unpleasant Anyway by the end of it I I was stitched up okay and yeah I think I went to school the next day and I got to I made up a whole bunch of stories as to when it happened I told some students that I had been hurt playing like been hit playing hockey or that I got from another school for that I’d been hit in the face by a plane propeller and a fun little story ever since I can’t possibly claim that I’ve had a nose job as my nose is now presumably a millimetre to half a millimetre shorter than it would be cut off yes. I’ll have to look back now and see how much this text to speech has absolutely butchered story
Analysis Questions
How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?
The text-to-speech will not add proper punctuation which means my story is a combination of 2 massive run-on sentences. It cannot recognize dialogue to put quotation marks around or provide any variation to punctuation such as exclamation marks, commas, question marks, etc.
The Google Docs voice typing feature also will only create a new line or paragraph if it is specifically instructed to in the speech itself. The end result is a massive block of text as opposed to breaking the text into paragraphs based on themes or related events/occurrences.
Dramatic pauses are lost between the voice to text as it won’t insert an ellipsis to demonstrate the pausing or trailing off present when writing down speech.
What is “wrong” in the text? What is “right”?
Most of the text appears to be “wrong” as the software incorrectly deciphered my spoken words. The lack of punctuation or any sentence structure whatsoever is also “wrong” in the text. I describe the errors more in-depth in the next question.
As for the few things that is “right” in the text I would say it (if we ignore the abysmal word recognition) it did its best to capture the flow of oral storytelling which, when viewed as “raw written data”, is a flood of information that clearly relies on pauses, tonal inflection, and possibly visual cues to provide context for the audience. It is interesting to see this comparison which I feel demonstrates Gnanadesikan’s statement that “[s]poken words, by contrast, are inherently ephemeral” (2011, p. 4).
What are the most common “mistakes” in the text and why do you consider them “mistakes”?
The most common mistake that I see is the incorrect transcription of my speech where it believes it has recognized the word – for example: “and then as I went to gravity might slowly dart” instead of the words I actually used which were: “…as I went to grab it he…”. These mistakes are so common in the transcription that the story appears to be largely incoherent, unreadable, and impossible to understand as an outsider with no knowledge of the story. Even as the story-teller and subject of the story, I can barely follow the text as it strays from a cohesive narrative to a mere collection of English words strung together in near-random order. As I was speaking it did appear that the software was not keeping up with the pace of my speech as it would get “stuck” trying to decipher my previously spoken words. This delay seemed to cause confusion where the words I was speaking at the moment would then be inserted back into the text out of order – ie. it wrote down the text in the order it was processed and recognized which didn’t 100% match the way it was spoken.
What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?
If I had scripted the story I believe I may have slightly alleviated the mistakes in the text as I could have focused more on my pace and enunciation. This could have made a difference in minimizing the amount of word recognition the software would have to do. The greater difference I could have made would be to train a voice model over time where the software learns to recognize the cadence and pronunciation of certain sounds your specific voice has. I never bother using the voice typing feature on Google Docs so it has little to no voice data to work off of. Google utilizes machine learning in its voice recognition which benefits from repetition and multiple iterations in a controlled environment. Windows Speech Recognition similarly has the user read a set paragraph to help it recognize specific sounds while managing volume.
In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling?
From this exercise I can observe the amount of data that is latently encoded in oral storytelling when contrasted with written storytelling. In oral storytelling, each pause and tonal shift communicates volumes of information that would either require an inordinate amount of words to describe or would be impossible to describe in written form. I feel this supports the statement from our readings this week that “writing is only a means of expressing language; it is not language itself” (Gnanadesikan, 2011, p. 4) as well as establishing the ironclad link between written and spoken language where orality remains the foundation. Ong shares how “‘[r]eading’ a text means converting it to sound, aloud or in the imagination, syllable-by-syllable in slow reading or sketchily in the rapid reading common to high-technology cultures” (2002, p. 8) and it is eye-opening to see our attempts to reverse this process with technology with varied success.
I have had a unique experience in my teaching career as I recently returned to BC after teaching at a high school in the Northwest Territories for two years. I had to make adjustments to my teaching style when faced with classes of only Indigenous students whose culture is founded on transferring knowledge through oral storytelling. I found that my lessons became more effective and engaging when I modelled them around storytelling and relying less on written language. Students could comprehend and engage with a problem that was shared with them verbally at a much higher rate than one presented in written form. I feel I was able to experience firsthand Ong’s statement that “[h]uman beings in primary oral cultures, those untouched by writing in any form, learn a great deal and possess and practice great wisdom, but they do not ‘study’ (2002, p. 8). Granted, the cultural aspect is only a microcosm of the issues surrounding literacy in reading and writing present in these communities and I am speaking from limited experience. It has been illuminating to see a visual demonstration of just how effective oral storytelling is at condensing and communicating a massive amount of information and to take that into consideration as I work with students with a varying ability to interact with written text.
Sources Cited:
Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011).“The First IT Revolution.” In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internetLinks to an external site. (Vol. 25). John Wiley & Sons (pp. 1-10).
Ong, W.J. (2002). Orality and Literacy: 30th Anniversary Edition (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.4324/9780203426258