This is just me musing idly about something of no real importance. It’s just a thing on the Forum that I’ve observed and find intriguing. I’m not judging anyone here!
Quite frequently I see posts in which it seems obvious to me that the poster is using a speech-to-text thing on their phone or other device, instead of typing. You can tell, because the resulting text contains the kind of soundalike/homophone errors you see in on-the-fly subtitles on the TV news. Sometimes the result is unintentionally funny; sometimes you can even tell a person’s regional accent, because the “wrong” word chosen by the app gives you a hint as to how they say their vowel sounds etc.
As someone who’s never used a speech-to-text service to post on a forum, it interests me. I have this vision of people speaking their responses into their phone (or smart speaker?? I dunno…) because life’s busy and their hands are full doing something else - or maybe they always use it cos of disability.
So I just wondered if my hunch is right. How many of us here do make use of this functionality to make forum posts, simply because (I imagine) it’s a lot easier than typing on a little screen?
Ooooo! This means I get the chance to make my very first POLL - how exciting!
I’m a typer. I’ve tried the speech to text converters before, and I end up spending more time correcting their output than if I were to type. However, for those with challenges whilst typing, they are invaluable and pretty amazing.
Oh dear - I think there’s something wrong with my poll. It’s currently showing a total of more than 100% of voters, and I’m sure I set it so people could only choose one option. Never mind - it’s only a bit of fun.
You could copy and paste this one in instead? It’ll reset the votes, but if you ask kindly enough people generally don’t mind voting again.
[poll name=redo type=regular results=always public=true chartType=bar]
* YES - I use speech-to-text a lot on the forum
* NO - I never do (or hardly ever)
* DEPENDS - I use both methods, as needed
[/poll]
That’s because people can vote more than once. It looks like someone has voted for 3 options or a couple of people have picked 2 options probably by mistake?
Didnt even know speech to text was an option. Might reduce my spelling gaffs if anything but im in the “do I really want to say it out loud where people might overhear” camp
I am 100% a typer, however… I still end up with lots of random word changes due to a mispressed key and predictive text changing it to something it thinks I’m sure to have meant!
I’m a typer. But I can tell when I’ve posted something via my laptop or phone as when using the mobile there’ll quite often be autocarrot errors I’ve not noticed.
Hmmm… so according to the poll results so far, basically everyone is a typer, not a talker. Looks like I’ve been misinterpreting instances like this one I’ve just seen:
It’s obvious that what @Mrs.John intended was “reposition”, and it seems an odd word for auto-complete/predictive text to choose instead - looks exactly like a speech-to-text error! Go figure…
