DRAGON, SIRI, AND “DICK TATE”: VOICE CAPTURE AS COMPOSING TECHNOLOGY

Hannah Rule, PhD | University of Cincinnati | hannah.rule@uc.edu

GOALS OF THIS PRESENTATION:

1. Explore the current state of adaptation and change in traditional composing tech

2. Track the rise and integration of voice capture (VC) features in everyday tech

3. Bring to bear the history of development of VC and voice recognition technologies (VRT)

4. Consider and propose a role for composition studies in theorizing and empirically studying VC

1. Climate of Change in Composing Technologies

“the end of buttons”the era of gesture control: swipe, pinch,

flick, tap

The Morphing Keyboard

feel of “old school typing”

“As everyone starts becoming more comfortable speaking aloud to their mobile gadgets, speech recognition technology will likely spill over into other types of devices. It isn't hard to imagine a near future when we'll be commanding our coffee makers, talking to our printers, and telling the lights to turn themselves off” (Pinola)

2. A History of VC/VRT

dictation

1990: “Dragon launched the first consumer speech recognition product, Dragon Dictate, for an incredible price of $9000.”

1997, the arrival of Dragon NaturallySpeaking: “the application recognized continuous speech, so you could speak, well, naturally, at about 100 words per minute. However, you had to train the program for 45 minutes, and it was still expensive at $695.”

Melanie Pinola,“Speech Recognition Through the

Decades: How we Ended up With Siri” (2011)

By 2001: “computer speech recognition had topped out at 80 percent accuracy, and, near the end of the decade, the technology's progress seemed to be stalled” (Pinola)

2001: David Pogue, tech writer for the NYTimes, wrist ailment leads him to dictation software in the late 90s:

“Only two major Windows dictation programs will then remain standing: I.B.M.’s ViaVoice and L & H’s NaturallySpeaking, which was Dragon’s Signature product”

“(And forget about dictation software on your palmtop, at least for now. Transcription programs thrive on beefy machinery, like 128 megabytes of memory and an 800-megahertz processor.)”

2003: Lee Honeycutt, “Researching the Use of Voice Recognition Writing Software,” Computers and Composition

“But despite the use of various dictation technologies for several decades now, little research has been conducted within composition studies on this particular method of writing” (78)

Now: “cell phones and other mobile devices are ideal vehicles for speech recognition, as the desire to replace their tiny on-screen keyboards serves as an incentive to develop better, alternative input methods” (Pinola)

“WE’RE AT A TRANSITION POINT WHERE

VOICE AND NATURAL-LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING ARE SUDDENLY

AT THE FOREFRONT…”

Vlad Sejnoha, chief technology officer of Nuance Communications (maker of Dragon)

—in Knight, 2012

HONEYCUTT “What is certain, though, is that VRT will

continue to improve and will join a palette of

other communication technologies for which all of us must discover

best practices. The computer keyboard will be around for

some time to come, but our voice might

soon replace the drudgery of

keyboarding” (93)

“There is little to suggest that continued product research or advancing technology will change this fact in the future; keyboard editing is simply faster and easier than voice editing” (83)

3. Relative Silence from R/C?

Honeycutt himselfDisability Studies and Education

History of Writing TechnologySonic Rhetoric

Implications and Directions

Voice in writing

Physical vs. text feature

Theoretical divisions

between speech and writing

Selfe—how deeply and ideological these divides

are

• MULTIMODALITY OF MAKING—SHIPKA

• ELBOW AND THE VIRTUES OF SPOKEN LANGUAGE FOR WRITTEN COMPOSITION

• EMPIRICAL STUDIES

Thank You! hannah.rule@uc.edu