Adding Voice to Your Words
A few days ago my eight-year-old daughter marched into my study looking for entertainment. Me, in other words.
I was dictating using voice recognition software. She wanted to play with it. I did not know if it would work with her eight-year-old voice and her Norwegian singsong version of English.
In the interests of science I put my work on hold. I pointed the microphone in her direction and asked her to read the six lines needed to calibrate for her voice. Her reading still needs a lot of work. Especially in English.
However, two lines in, the software did some heavy lifting and invited her to speak her mind.
She did. She drafted a passable letter to her mother. As with anything else she writes or draws, it featured a dragon. Passable, in her case, meant 100 words with a couple of mistakes en route. It was much faster than she could type or write by hand. A miracle.
I normally dictate about 400 words correctly at about 100 wpm before a misinterpretation
Then she tried speaking in Norwegian. That did not work.
I thought we might solve the problem using Google Translate. If she were to dictate into the English box it would – on-the-fly – translate into Norwegian. We had a lot of fun with that. Not a perfect translation, but much better than either of us could write Norwegian.
At the bottom of the translated box displaying Google’s translation a speaker icon appears for some languages. We clicked on that, and her English words were read back to her in Norwegian. (Check out the results for this paragraph here if you want to.)
Go ahead, you know you want to. Ask Google to translate it into French or Chinese.
I don’t know about you, but that’s freaking magic.
And then something occurred to me. One of the biggest challenges when reviewing your own writing is that you see what you think you wrote. That’s why having another editor is useful.
But it costs time and money for someone else to read each item I write.
I took the few hundred words I had just written in English before being disturbed and asked Google Translate to speak it back. (That speaker icon appears in both boxes – the source language as well as the translated language.) Not quite the voice of Morgan Freeman but it highlighted a few errors I had missed.
It’s amazing how you can use these free technologies to hurdle almost any hindrance.
This morning, as I finished this article, I used Google Translate to read back the written version of what I thought I had written. (By hand, in bed.) It found three mistakes you won’t need to tell me about.
Contrast this easy access to 90 languages with the costs and effort needed to learn each. We live in magical times.