#1 – Task 3: Voice to Text Task
Author: Jamie Zhou
Link: https://blogs.ubc.ca/zhu540/2025/01/21/task-3-voice-to-text/
I connected with Jamie’s Task 3 post because we shared similar experiences in our reflections. Both Jamie and I used Apple Notes and Apple Dictation to record our voices, and we came away with several of the same understandings. We both found that our oral text had a much more natural flow of thoughts, like a conversation, rather than a well-written and articulated piece of writing. We found that both our texts contained many run-on sentences and grammatical issues, and that if we had taken the time to script our stories, our thinking would have been clearer for the reader.
Reflecting on this task and the readings from the module, I am reminded of the importance of writing and its impact on shaping human history. As Gnanadesikan (2011) notes, writing is a form of external memory storage for human societies; however, it also strongly connects to Marshall McLuhan’s concept of “the medium is the message.” Both Jamie and I found that the medium of dictation on our Apple devices changed the meaning of our messages. Our thoughts were contaminated by filler words, and our thinking was less clear than if we had sat down and written the text ourselves rather than relying on a program to transcribe our words. While this task demonstrates how writing can externalize our ideas, it also highlights how the process of externalization can change their meaning.
Due to the constraints of the course design, both Jamie and I were limited to presenting our oral components of this assignment in text format. However, this format lacks intonation, inflection, and other auditory cues that are vital to storytelling. It would be interesting to conduct this task again, but to encourage students to share their original voice recordings and have them compare the various formats.
References:
Gnanadesikan, A.E. (2011). The first IT revolution. In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet (pp. 1-12). John Wiley & Sons.
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