The following story was transcribed using the Windows 11 speech to text tool.

Unedited Story Transcript:

Back when I was a university student I had lived with a number of different roommates over the years and some were good some were bad I’m going to tell you about one particular roommate I had there was a problem so I lived in a shared house with five other people there were four bedrooms and one bedroom there was a couple but that doesn’t matter and while I was living there we had in the kitchen separate cupboards so each person would put their food in their own cupboard to avoid mixing it in with the fruit of the other people and I started noticing that somebody was eating my food you know it would have been something Meyer like a few slices of bread disappearing some cookies gone that sort of thing and when it happened I had asked round to different people and who lived in the house to see if they knew anything nobody admitted to knowing anything and it came to a head when one day I created her I cooked some chicken fettuccine and I cooked a big batch and left some of it in the fridge for my lunch the next day well the next day I came home and looked in the fridge to eat my lunch and someone had eaten all of the chicken out of the fettuccine so it’s just passed a noodles no chicken and that really **** me off so one of the other girls who was living with me at the time I talked to her poda and she told me that somebody had been stealing her food as well so we decided to figure out how we could catch this person we had two suspects there was one guy living in the basement who was a bit of a stoner you know he smoked a lot of marijuana and we’ve we’ve surmised that he would you know get high and get hungry and then go to the kitchen and start eating other people’s food and then there’s another girl who was a bit of a introvert she stayed in a room a lot and she was a bit overweight but we know she ate mostly just healthy food we didn’t see her eating that much and we wondered like ok does she overweight because she’s actually just sneaking food we didn’t really know I talked to my sister about it and she had a bear arm she used this when she was walking home at night after school and so I asked her if I could borrow it so a bear alarm is basically a small black box with a pin in it attached to AA cord and you can hook it to a bell or put it in a bag and though it works is if you pull the pin out it makes a very loud piercing shrieking sound and the purpose is to scare away bears and so I borrowed it from her and I used a bit of string and some tape and I hooked it up inside my cupboard in the kitchen as I said everyone had a separate covered and hooked it up in a way so that if somebody pulled the door open for the cupboard they would pull the pin out of the barrel alarm and make a loud shriek and thus alerting everyone in the house that somebody was in my cupboard so I set that up and then the next day I was in my room which was on a different floor and I think I was reading maybe playing a video game and suddenly I heard the sound the other girl who I was conspiring with was also home and we both rushed to the kitchen at the same time to see who was there and it was the overweight girl now she denied taking any of our food she said she was just looking in there for something else I can’t remember the exact excuse she gave but she did not admit to taking any of our food however after that we found that the rate of food stealing decreased significantly

Analysis
The first obvious issue in this transcript is that there is almost no punctuation or capitalization, and no paragraph breaks. While telling my story, I made multiple pauses – both for dramatic effect and to think about what I was going to say next. These pauses that exist in speech are generally expressed in writing through punctuation, so its absence makes the story difficult to follow. Paragraphs also help structure a story in writing and allow the reader to easily find their place. If someone begins reading the above transcript and loses their place, the absence of structural elements may make it challenging to find where they left off.

The second issue is that the speech to text tool transcribed incorrectly in multiple places. For example (spoken phrase on the left, transcribed word on the right):

food –> fruit
minor –> Meyer
pasta –> passed a
bear arm –> bear alarm

While telling the story, I stuttered briefly. My intention was to say “attached to a cord”, but I said “a” twice. It was transcribed as “AA”. Stuttering over words is usually only found in speech, so the tool did not know how to handle this in text form.

An additional issue is that the tool censored my speech. I said “That really pissed me off,” but the tool wrote “pissed” as ****.

All of these are problematic, in particular the incorrect words, because they don’t accurately communicate to the reader what I intended with my story. When we communicate through any technology or our own voices, we want the reader to accurately understand the intended message. Changes like the ones created here interfere with communication. The censorship using **** is an intentional feature of the tool, but it still alters my intent to express the frustration I experienced during that moment of the story.

The differences I’ve mentioned highlight the challenges in converting speech into text and why direct transcription can be problematic for communication. However, this is not only the case with writing. This is not the first time I’ve told this story, but the other times I’ve told it were live and face-to-face. For this task, while speaking into the microphone, I adjusted my speaking to account for the fact that it was audio only and not live. I was careful to describe what a bear alarm was because many people do not know. If I were telling this story in person, I could gauge by the audience’s reaction whether a description of the bear alarm was needed or simply pull up a picture on my phone rather than describing it in detail. Even though it was speech, the act of using technology to record the communication changed the way I decided to tell it.

The technology of writing requires us to to alter our communications to something that can persist through space and time (Haas, 2013). However, the fact that I altered my communication even for recorded speech signifies that it is the persistence the technology affords and our perceptions of the audience that will encounter it which causes these alterations. No matter the medium, the attempt to use technology to communicate through space and time impacts the way we communicate.

Reference
Haas, C. (2013). The technology question. In Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy (pp. 3-23). Routledge