Yesterday, while I sat in my car in the parking lot waiting for my son to get out of school, I decided to try using my phone’s voice-to-text capability to dictate some writing. Yes, I know that this technology has existed for many years, but I had never tried it before. I like to type, on a real keyboard. It’s very satisfying to feel and see the words move from my brain into my hands, and then onto the page. I think differently when speaking than when writing; so much so that as I talked to my phone, I wondered if what I was doing was speaking or writing or neither? If you're writing without using your hands, are you really writing at all?
I haven’t read what I wrote yesterday, though I know that the first paragraph will be a hot mess because I didn’t realize that you had to actually tell the voice-to-text software to add punctuation. Garbage in, garbage out, right? I would have thought that it would be weird or annoying to have to say “comma” or “period,” but it’s not, and it works very well. Although I do wonder what the technology would make of that last sentence. How does it handle the words “comma” and “period”? I’ll try it and see, some other time. For now, I’ll skip the artificial intelligence and stick with the natural kind, limited though it may very well be. The words you just read were produced the old-fashioned way, typed on a Chromebook into a Google Doc, the way God intended.
No comments:
Post a Comment