Video Transcript – Text-to-speech and voice dictation technology: Uni student experience

Video Transcript

[Music]

[Text-to-speech technology reading from computer screen]: The beginnings of the Human Resource field can be traced back to the industrial revolution when Robert Owen and Charles Babbage expressed the view that the health of workers was fundamental for an organization to function at its best. In the 20th century Frederik Winslow Taylor introduced…

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[Randy]: My name is Randy and I am studying at the University of Tasmania doing a Social Science degree. What interests me about Social Science is the two areas of my major focus, and that’s Sociology and Human Resource Management. Sociology is I think, biasedly speaking, is a wonderful field of study. Because it studies the patterns and social structures within society. For a very long time, my disability was with reading and writing. I couldn’t read and couldn’t write effectively until I was diagnosed with dyslexia and the issue for me personally was that I couldn’t construct words or couldn’t make sense of words when I saw them so that they became sort of an abstract concept so I just didn’t understand and I couldn’t read and simply because I didn’t understand or couldn’t conceptualize phonetics. Each word for me was a picture and if I didn’t know that picture or I wasn’t introduced to it I couldn’t understand it.

I was first introduced to assistive technology actually watching a movie, Golden Eye 007. A woman was using voice commands to control her computer and I’d heard about this, that it was an up-and-coming technology, so what happened was I decided that I wanted to go to university and in order to do that I thought well I have to do it somehow so I just looked up disability technologies for reading and writing and found it on YouTube. And that’s where it all started. The assistive technology that I use is Dragon Speech and what that does is it listens to the sound of my voice and what I say goes directly onto a Word document. So, that means that I can write my essays and that it reads back to me what I have written. I also use another technology, text to speech, and what the University provides me is all my textbooks in a PDF file, I then highlight the text in that file and it plays it to me. What I do is that I also buy my textbooks and I follow along and I learn the words that I otherwise wouldn’t know and I basically learn how to read and conceptualize the content which has been absolutely fantastic for me personally as a student and for my own sense of worth.

This assistive technology has been life changing for me. I have been able to communicate my thoughts and ideas for the first time to people and it’s like that I have been heard. I thought that I was destined to be in a dead-end job, because that was all that was available to me and quite honestly I didn’t have much self worth because I was told and considered myself incapable of engaging as a properly functioning member of society. Now for my self-worth and being able to be heard for the first time and to express myself has just been wonderful.

There’s always going to be a barrier, that’s just life. If you have a disability, work it. You can do it, it’s going to be fine. It’s always hard in the beginning, but you can do it, you just have to be persistent and ask for help and don’t be afraid. It’s always scary, everything is scary, you just got to do it. Throw yourself at it and slowly but surely you will get a handle of it. [Music]