On 21 December I wrote about the kids’ first impressions of being in London. I had scribbled it down on paper at the time and then, later, tried using a new voice recognition tool that Google provided. I have spoken to people who have previously used other voice recognition systems and they say that it takes a while for it to learn your voice. I found with the Google one that it didn’t take me long to learn how to speak ‘Google.’ I have to slow down – I generally speak quickly, even for a Kiwi – and annunciate carefully. There are some words I had to learn to pronounce differently as Mr Google just couldn’t work out what I was trying to say. When I tried saying ‘six’ he thought I was Australian!
I am now well along the training path, although I
wasn’t always this fluent. Here is an
extract from the aforementioned entry as it was interpreted by Mr Google
followed by what it was supposed to have been
Joel they are friends and talk new caravans
Joel – they are tall.
Maria - they are stuck
together.
There there is not paradise mario some of the people don't have a bet
Joel – there’s not much
space.
Maria – some of the people
don’t even have a backyard
Booko there's a school and boxes new paradise you're even in a call back
paradise
Luka – there are squirrels
and foxes.
Joel – even in people’s
backyards
This reminds me of something that happened when I was
teaching in London in 1997 and another thing that happened this morning.
In ’97 I was doing relief teaching in different
schools and I came to realise there were certain words the English kids found
difficult to understand with my Kiwi accent. One of them was the number ‘ten’.
One day, with a class of about 30 kids, I told them that I was about to say a
word three times in a row and I wanted them to write down what word they
thought I was saying i.e. there was no context to give them any clues. I said
-
Ten…ten…ten
Of the 30 kids almost all thought I was saying ‘tin’;
only one thought I was saying ‘ten’. For them to hear ‘ten’ I have to say
‘tan’!
This morning in church there were various people
taking parts of the service in the local Anglican church. The vicar, who was
from Northern Ireland, got up at the beginning and explained that the sound system
was playing up and apologised in advance for any inconvenience this might cause
– how very British! He then proceeded to the front of the church – if you were
outside – or the back if you were inside, and then returned down the isle with
the pomp and ceremony that the British Church of Englanders enjoy.
Once the procession reached the front the curate was
the first to speak.
I digress. I spent three months in Romania in 1997.
Each week I dutifully attended the church of the minister with whom I was
staying. When I first arrived I knew no Romanian and he knew no English. The
only word we both understood, and used it multiple different contexts, was the
German word ‘kaputt’. Things that were broken, sick, damaged, exhausted, ended,
or dead were all ‘kaputt’.
When he preached I was none the wiser at the end of
the sermon than I was at the beginning of it – it’s amazing that different
cultures do church so similarly!
One of the speakers knew a little English, and
whenever he read the Bible scripture he would tell me the reference in English;
I would look it up in my Bible and try to work out what I thought his three
points, all starting with the same letter, might be!
In this morning’s service the congregation looked
representative of the area we live i.e. a large variety of cultures. So when
the curate got up and spoke in a different language I wasn’t surprised. We
returned to the vicar speaking English and then the Bible reading was in
another tongue, sounding somewhat French. We returned to the curate who again
spoke in a foreign tongue. It seemed to me a rather large percentage of the
service was not in English. Fortunately, however, being an Anglican church we
had the lectionary in English and I was able to pass the time reading it while
I waited for non-English speakers to let the English speakers continue with the
service.
It was during this reading that it suddenly dawned on
me that I recognised about every forth or fifth word that was spoken. Then I
noticed that those words coincided with every forth of fifth worth in the
written sheets. Then I realised that they were actually speaking English, just
with heavy, heavy accents.
It was at that point that I thought it would be so
much easier if everyone spoke the Queen’s English with a Kiwi accent – as it is
meant to be.
11 January
Voice
Recognition Training
Maria is learning to read and write. In the last few
months there has been an explosion in her abilities. She is not afraid to sound
out words and to guess the spellings. A boost to her ability to find
information – mainly pictures at this stage, due to her limited reading ability
when the online search is complete – is Google Voice Search which uses voice
recognition to find information and images on the internet. We refer to an
internet search as ‘Asking Mr Google?’ When we are on a bus trip she will now
often say to me, “Dad, can I talk to Mr Google?”
At first Maria wasn’t able to get the results she
wanted, but pretty soon ‘Mr Google’ had given her some training. Over the
course of a few minutes her voice searching went something like this
-
PullupsomepicturesofFrozen
(i.e. very fast. ‘Frozen’ is a kids’ movie)
-
Pull up some
picturesofFrozen
-
Pull up some
pictures of Frozen
-
Show pictures of
Frozen
-
Please show
Frozen photos
Technology, wow! I’ve spent years trying to get her to
say, “Please”!
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