Find a link to Linda Duong’s Voice to Text task.

Linda and I approached this task very differently.  We were both given the same parameters to complete the task, however, I think our experiences differed.  Linda told an impromptu, unscripted story that seemed to jump around a lot, where my unscripted story was focused on a specific topic.  Linda did tell the story of a recent dream she had but she also voiced other thoughts that she was having, which were dictated in the text.

In order to add punctuation to the story, the user has to say the punctuation as a command as part of the dictation (e.g. period, comma, new paragraph), which wasn’t required in the assignment.  Most of my colleagues, including Linda, who completed this task didn’t include any punctuation in their stories.  I enjoyed playing around with this function on my phone and while completing this task said some punctation commands that I had never previously used to see if they would work and was thrilled when they did.  I continued to use these punctation commands, as I didn’t want to publish a story with little to no punctuation in it (originally, I was just going to say the period command).  As I continued to tell my story I found myself trying to think of the story and the proper punctuation commands simultaneously, which became very difficult.  Instead of “playing” and inserting punctuation while completing this task, it may have been better to tell my story, as I found that there were some details that I forgot to tell.  Linda and I were both impressed that the voice to text functions could differentiate proper nouns and automatically capitalized these words.

In 5 minutes, Linda was able to tell a much longer story than I was.  I think that Linda probably speaks a lot faster than I do and during this task spoke a lot faster than I did.  I found myself speaking slower and clearer while completing this task, as I would when I’m recording videos for my students and doing voice overs for training materials that I have created.

This specific task required us to record our voice and use a dictation application or voice to text function on our phones to tell a story.  Linda used Speechnotes and I used a pre-installed function on my Apple iPhone known as the voice to text function.  Linda indicated that Speechnotes changed a lot of the actual words she said to something else.  I found that the voice to text function on my iPhone picked up on 80-90% of the actual words and punctuation commands that I said, and I wonder if this is because I use the voice to text function, as well as, Siri often.  I feel like my phone has learned how I annunciate words and that’s why it was able to accurately dictate my story.

Linda has chosen WordPress and has used the theme Akismet as a web authoring tool. Linda and I are using the same web authoring tool, however, I am using the WPshoppe theme for this class.  I like the styling options of Linda’s theme and I think that the end-user interface is intuitive and visually appealing.

When you go to Linda’s homepage you go to a home page that introduces herself.  She has a menu enabled to go to her different blog posts and she has a number of different menus organized with different links.  The links are the assignments that she has completed, which are listed by task.  I think that this is very intuitive for this class and allows users visiting her webspace to easily find the posts for tasks she has completed.  You can also see whose webspaces Linda has most recently commented on.  Alternatively, when you go to my homepage you can see a list of my blog posts in chronological order.  I have no categories set up.  When you click on a specific post, you can also click on the previous post and the following post at the bottom of the page.  I’ve titled each post and excluded the task number from the title.  I think that the architecture of Linda’s webspace is set up well and speaks to organizational literacies that she may possess.