Two of my kids have dyslexia. A couple of years ago the school suggested my son should try to get help from a text-to-speech/speech-to-text tool (Kurzweil if I remember correctly).

The installation and the usage was not that kid-friendly, so I started to look into the software. I was pretty impressed. I could talk and the tool did write down in almost perfect Dutch, with zero typos, what I was dictating.

So I started to use that tool while translating and I could immediately feel the nature of the job had changed. I learned that I basically tend to think with my fingers, not with my mouth. I cannot describe the change any better. But I somehow had the feeling I was at least as productive, and my sentences sounded better.

Despite this positive feeling, I decided NOT to work like this, for several reasons:

• I had become my own full-time reviewer. My translations were going smoothly if I had clear sentences in my head and if I did not change my mind about them. But as soon as I wanted to edit my own speech-to-text, I had to use a keyboard anyhow. That being said: I could drop the keyboard if I wanted to, but I needed my mouse twice as much.
• The speech-to-text software wasn’t integrated in my CAT, so I had to use the mouse to change segments, to start recording… I ended up integrating the two, but it never paid off. When you start a development like this, you move one ping-pong ball from a pile, and before you know you’re moving the whole pile.
• I got frustrated the dictionary (aka terminology list) I was using for translation, was not linked in any way to the dictionary the speech-to-text tool was using.
• Working in IT most of the stuff I had to translate contained words that we do not translate in Dutch. Unlike the French we don’t have our own words for every English word. A PC is a PC, a computer is a computer. There are too many words for which the closest soundex match was found, so I ended up fixing those all the time. The fact the auto-propagate did not step in and solved this, disappointed me a lot.
• The speech-to-text software, I guess, had been trained on recognizing Dutch speech. My Flemish soft “G” too often mislead the software, sometimes resulting in funny near matches.
• A last frustration, one for the road: I wanted to use speech-to-text for editing pre-translated output, and the speech-to-text software was not using the words in the sentence that were there. So I saw the right words, and the pre-translation was helpful to me, but NOT to the speech-to-text tool. I could not simply change word order. The sentence was rewritten from scratch as if there had been no pre-translation at all.

This experiment I did about 5 years ago.  Now my daughter came home with even better software. I wonder if I should give it another try.

Has someone had other & better experience with this kind of technology? Does someone know a translation tool that has built-in text-to-speech technology?

Photo Credits: Camille Kimberly (Sorry I could not resist to add the microphone icon)