Voice recognition technology is making it easier than ever to dictate text rather than write it. Richard Powers, author of the 2006 National Book Award winner The Echo Maker, wrote most of that book by dictating it into a computer program. Of course, dictating to humans has been happening for centuries. John Milton is said to have dictated Paradise Lost to his daughters, and Mark Twain supposedly dictated much of his Autobiography. But as Powers explained in an essay, dictating to a computer changes the way one puts words on the page. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Writing With Voice Recognition Software”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
More and more voice recognition technology is part of our daily lives. When you call customer service, you’re asked to press or say one. Or maybe you’ve consulted Siri, the iPhone assistant. And voice recognition means that now you can compose large amounts of text, even books, by just speaking. No need for a pen. No need to type. Just say what you want and the words magically appear on the screen.
And in the past, many great writers have dictated their work, but that was to human transcriptionists. John Milton supposedly recited Paradise Lost to his daughters, and they wrote it down. Mark Twain dictated much of his autobiography. One modern convert to dictation is the author Richard Powers. In 2006, his novel, The Echo Maker, won the National Book Award, and he wrote most of that novel speaking it into a computer. He described that process in an essay.
At first, he writes, it wasn’t easy. I needed weeks to get over the oddness of auditioning myself in an empty room, to trust to the flow of speech, to learn to hear myself think all over again. But eventually, Powers found that dictating allowed him, as he put it, to live above the level of the phrase, thinking in full paragraphs and capturing the rhythmic arcs before they fade. I spend less mental overhead on orthography and finger mechanics and more on hearing my characters speak themselves into existence. Mostly, he says, I’m just a little closer to what my cadences might mean when replayed in the sub-vocal voices of some other auditioner.
And I love that description of how his narrative voice might sound to a reader. And so, Grant, now I’m beginning to wonder how my own writing might be affected if I use dictation technology. Have you ever tried that? Have you ever tried to write emails with dictation?
Oh, man, a long time ago when the technology and the CPUs weren’t very good. Oh, yeah, I did it a long time ago. And I would be sitting there with a microphone saying, okay, and then it would type bouquet.
Yeah, and it only works when you’re alone. It can’t work in an office where there are cubicles or other people can hear you. Otherwise, somebody might leap over and shout something in your microphone and put something naughty down.
Well, I did try that the other day with a dictation program, and I was shocked at how good it was. They’re vastly better. David Pogue, the technology columnist of the New York Times, uses this stuff fervently, and he will go on the record saying it’s the only reason he can get a lot of his work done, because it just saves him so much time.
Right. We’d love to hear what you have to say about dictation. Do you use it? Do you use it to write books or papers or anything like that? Do you think it’s changing the way that we think and write?
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