Dragon, Siri , and “Dick Tate”: Voice Capture as Composing Technology Hannah Rule, PhD | University of Cincinnati |

1. Dragon, Siri, and “Dick Tate”: Voice Capture as Composing Technology Hannah Rule, PhD | University of Cincinnati | hannah.rule@uc.edu

2. Goals of this presentation: • Explore the current state of adaptation and change in traditional composing tech • Track the rise and integration of voice capture (VC) features in everyday tech • Bring to bear the history of development of VC and voice recognition technologies (VRT) • Consider and propose a role for composition studies in theorizing and empirically studying VC

3. “the end of buttons”the era of gesture control: swipe, pinch, flick, tap 1.Climate of Change in Composing Technologies

4. feel of “old school typing” The Morphing Keyboard

5. “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)

6. 2. A History of VC/VRT 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) dictation

7. By 2001: “computer speech recognition had topped out at 80 percent accuracy, and, near the end of the decade, the technology's progressseemed 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.’sViaVoice 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)

8. “We’re at a transition point where voice and natural-languageunderstanding are suddenly at the forefront…”VladSejnoha, chief technology officer of Nuance Communications (maker of Dragon)—in Knight, 2012 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)

9. “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) Honeycutt

10. 3. Relative Silence from R/C? Honeycutt himself Disability Studies and Education History of Writing Technology Sonic Rhetoric

11. 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

12. Thank You!hannah.rule@uc.edu