Post Aq7gDbKFgaIXkrTUyO by n1vux@mastodon.radio
(DIR) More posts by n1vux@mastodon.radio
(DIR) Post #Aq7fvYnIMLdigtSOO0 by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-01-16T00:24:44Z
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Another technology that was supposed to change the world was speech to text. The idea was that everyone would be writing so much more because you just needed to talk, and isn't that easier than typing. I've even tried this. It's not that great. It's really hard, as it turns out, to speak like the written word. Even when I'd get most of full short story down the editing was a nightmare. I wonder if anyone writes by dictation? Some people must. But I suspect it takes practice.
(DIR) Post #Aq7gDbKFgaIXkrTUyO by n1vux@mastodon.radio
2025-01-16T00:27:49Z
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@futurebird practice, and at least with the early ones that required training user along with recognizer, prolonged monotone voice could result in straining the vocal cords, which is even worse socially than straining wrists. I do know of a novelist who is (was?) mostly dictating via speech to text. (As well as a programmer who was working via speech to text!)
(DIR) Post #Aq7gmwGno6OOqdiBHc by ellestad@sfba.social
2025-01-16T00:34:20Z
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@futurebird I've tried a couple times to use auto transcribed recordings of training sessions for creating documentation, but to be honest it is less work to take notes and write the documentation from that.
(DIR) Post #Aq7h19tZwdsvA1d5XM by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-01-16T00:36:57Z
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@ellestad It also makes me think that secretaries who would "take dictation" for letters and other documents were doing a much more complex task that they were ever credited with.
(DIR) Post #Aq7h60sws7EIfEeKqO by ryanrandall@hcommons.social
2025-01-16T00:37:47Z
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@futurebird About 10 years ago a professor I know had wrist surgery and had to go almost a full semester with absolutely minimal typing.She got used to using dictation eventually, but in the meantime we got lots of emails with stray sentences like "oh for duck's sake. Duck's sake? Class, you know I'd never say duck when I want to say duck. Anyways…"
(DIR) Post #Aq7hMO9M8sRvS38Gps by knf100@sfba.social
2025-01-16T00:40:46Z
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@futurebird @ellestad my office (a state commission) is mostly just analysts and supervisors now. But not even 20 years ago it was all stenographers and just a few supervisors and analysts. and paper lots of paper.
(DIR) Post #Aq7hSjVFfGTfPlOo1g by ohmu@social.seattle.wa.us
2025-01-16T00:41:53Z
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@futurebird @ellestad I took dictation as a young worker. It was challenging but doable as long as it came in periods of work with rests.
(DIR) Post #Aq7heb44rc3iicLUqu by r343l@freeradical.zone
2025-01-16T00:44:03Z
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@futurebird Due to excess optimism about new technology and underfunding, a lot of US state govt services for the blind and low vision (& some NGOs) deprioritized braille. A lot of folks do use screen readers and text to speech most of the time. Text to speech is often very unlike "standard" written English for various registers. It's hard to speak to a computer in a way that results in text that reads like it wasn't spoken. Very hard.
(DIR) Post #Aq7i1LbqUarrRezNFA by davep@infosec.exchange
2025-01-16T00:48:10Z
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@futurebird I knew one person who used to use speech to text about 20 years ago. In an open office. Luckily it was at a client site I didn't visit often or I'd probably have gone postal.
(DIR) Post #Aq7ida82xSq1TqHYTQ by hashraydamon@me.dm
2025-01-16T00:55:04Z
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@futurebird I'm pretty sure I can type faster I can talk, so I never saw the appeal
(DIR) Post #Aq7jcNuwyQQjGx9KT2 by apophis@brain.worm.pink
2025-01-16T00:56:27.686923Z
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@futurebird i know one lawyer who swears by it and i can't wrap my head around it at alli'd need to type it out, then rehearse it a few times, then read it to the machine after like 5 hours of procrastination
(DIR) Post #Aq7jdhJuJxWRjoRu76 by fullyabstract@fosstodon.org
2025-01-16T01:06:15Z
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@futurebird Maybe the thing would be to go back to the oral tradition, and work and rework the story, orally, and only finally turn the speach recognition software on?
(DIR) Post #Aq7jmkM6P9c9l4n4vA by stephen@microbe.vital.org.nz
2025-01-16T00:54:59.696174Z
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@futurebird @ellestad oh hell yes. My late father came up in that era and dictated most of his correspondence for his secretary. I talked to him about it and he freely admitted that he expressed himself normally, with the same pauses and ums and ahs and rewording and "scratch that, what I meant was" that you and I would. And his secretary of course turned that into grammatically correct prose in more or less his style. An accurate transcript of his speech would have been useless, and an automated paraphrase dangerous. But anyway she was doing a lot of work!(incidentally, as email became a thing, Dad refused to use it and got his secretary to filter it, not because he didn't know how, but he felt far too many people were trying to get his attention as it was, and the last thing he needed was a direct channel they could use. So another very important thing his secretary did was make judgement calls about who deserved that attention... not something to trust to an AI, I would think).
(DIR) Post #Aq7nMUGS0Zum8jsgoS by tuban_muzuru@ohai.social
2025-01-16T01:48:00Z
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@futurebird I use S->T quite a bit. It's much better than it once was.
(DIR) Post #Aq7soSsDGycZhmhioi by catmisgivings@stranger.social
2025-01-16T02:49:05Z
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@futurebird I dictate search queries and texts a bunchI feel like my phone used to do a lot better at speech to text several years ago, somehow? Now I have to do a bunch of finessing before hitting send
(DIR) Post #Aq7tLuneSpJ5sEWMeO by HighlandLawyer@mastodon.social
2025-01-16T02:55:08Z
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@futurebird @ellestad When I was a trainee, I was taught to give dictation (using really modern micro cassette recorder), but also learned shorthand myself, and set up computerised document creation systems. Dictation isn't just about speaking the text that is going to be printed, it is a division of labour using the expertise of the secretary in document creation & management- which is why experienced legal secretaries can easily progress to paralegals with some training in black letter law.
(DIR) Post #Aq88s7aDyAiC6G3Vgm by TheOtterDragon@eldritch.cafe
2025-01-16T05:49:01Z
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@futurebird It's been very helpful when I had nerve damage and couldn't use my writing hand properly. But it takes some editing, yes.
(DIR) Post #Aq8LSheqWOStrGQYwS by david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
2025-01-16T08:10:05Z
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@futurebird This was obviously nonsense, for the same reason most voice control is: we had prior experience with it.Before computers were common, executives had typists who would type letters for them. Initially you’d dictate to someone who would write shorthand (at the speed of speaking) and then someone (possibly the same person) would transcribe it with a typewriter. By the ‘80s, it was common to replace this with a dictaphone that you’d speak into and then the secretary would replay the tape and be able to rewind and pause, eliminating the need for shorthand.Once computers became useful enough that every executive had one on their desk, they learned to type and found that typing their own letters was faster than dictating. A lot of these people were sufficiently well paid that having someone to type your letters as a status symbol was perfectly viable and they still didn’t do it. A human who knows you and your style well is going to do a lot better a job than a computer, so serves as a good proxy for the perfect computerised text to speech. The people who had access to it and had an incentive to treat using it as a status symbol did not use it because it was less productive than just typing. The only people for whom it makes a difference are those who can’t use their hands, whether as a permanent disability or something transient like having them occupied performing surgery, driving, cooking, or whatever. And there the comparison point is remembering the thing you wanted to type until later. Computers are great at things that replace the need for remembering things. As was paper before it (sorry Socrates, all the cool kids use external memory, listen to Plato).In the ‘90s there were experiments doing the same kind of ‘simulate the perfect voice command by using a human as a proxy’ thing and they all showed that it was an improvement only when the human had a lot of agency. None of the benefit came from using natural language (using jargon or restricted command sets was usually less ambiguous) all of the benefit came from a human being able to do a load of things in response to a simple command. And you can get the same benefits without adding voice control.Humans evolved manual dexterity long before they evolved language and have a lot of spare processing available for offloading tasks that involve hands. Try reading a piece of piano music and saying the notes in your head as fast as they’re played (you can’t say them aloud that fast, but even forming them into thoughts expressed in natural language is hard).
(DIR) Post #Aq8SCI86MlFfjJEUyW by llewelly@sauropods.win
2025-01-16T09:25:36Z
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@futurebird Sagan is often cited as a person who wrote by dictation. But I seem to recall there's an essay of his in which he goes on at some length about his human secretary's remarkable ability to correct his most frequent errors and suggest improvements.
(DIR) Post #Aq8Tou5zl24qRCDtk8 by JeffreyJDean@hcommons.social
2025-01-16T09:43:44Z
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@futurebird According to her husband, the classic mystery writer Margery Allingham used to write her first drafts in longhand and *then* dictate them to a secretary, adjusting the diction on the fly to be more like speech than writing.
(DIR) Post #Aq8kzz951OO0VOXI0W by clive@saturation.social
2025-01-16T12:55:08Z
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@futurebird My wife and I both use it for texting (we text a ton, including voluminously with each other 😂) and I use it to jot down notes when I’m reporting or I’m out somewhere and have an idea/observation I want to get done the main thing I’ve noticed is that voice-writing works well for any text scored to an oral cadence — so, works for email for me, but not for a first draftI wrote a blog post two years ago about this: https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-literary-style-of-voice-dictation-6968cf2209c9?sk=0aa48570d0f0b0b030bdeeae6ff33b15
(DIR) Post #Aq8lsPoC6Y2spxilWK by grumpasaurus@infosec.exchange
2025-01-16T13:06:04Z
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@futurebird I was very impressed with Nick Kroll's speech to text skills https://youtu.be/wOskfnnbkdw?si=DJKLm1V6QW52wSjZ
(DIR) Post #Aq8ves2nKOzDtZjLSy by femme_mal@mstdn.social
2025-01-16T14:55:40Z
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@futurebird @ellestad They were, and I was among them.Imagine trying to eke a time-sensitive letter from a recording made while an EVP sat on a plane closest to the plane's engine. Imagine trying to piece together muffled words over the changing drone as the plane changed altitude and the pilot spoke on the PA. Imagine knowing where to insert boilerplate legalese where the EVP said, "Et cetera, you know" followed by an abrupt segue, "Oh don't forget my dry cleaning."-__-
(DIR) Post #Aq8z22CQ2M2lujy8sS by lufthans@mastodon.social
2025-01-16T15:33:29Z
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@futurebird Kevin J Anderson takes an audio recorder when hiking and reportedly does much of his writing that way
(DIR) Post #Aq9Z0OnYdkUnm4rN7Q by cshlan@dawdling.net
2025-01-16T22:16:10Z
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@futurebirdI do occasionally. Once I was having a really bad day and just needed to get a bunch of stuff out and I only had my phone. Tiny typing wasn't going to help so I dictated it into a note app.It censored my cursing which only made everything worse.But it's good for responding to texts when I'm driving. Car play makes that simple in my car.
(DIR) Post #Aq9jvBXnafNkiPCmhc by maysonic@twit.social
2025-01-17T00:18:48Z
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@futurebird @ellestad My mother was, for a number of years, secretary for a school system’s superintendent of special education (a guy with an EdD). She said that she wrote all his letters, as he was pretty much unable to draft a coherent sentence, much less a paragraph . (During the Depression she was a schoolteacher in a one-room school.)