Shorthand Dictation

Shorthand is a hobby of mine. Unfortunately, dictating at the slow speeds I need is not a hobby of anyone I know.

Hubby has written an online utility which, combined with a (free) voice synthesizer, will dictate text at the speed you choose.

It does this by adding time between the words rather than slowing down the words. (Slowing down the words too much becomes incomprehensible.)

http://onebit.ca/cgi-bin/short.py

Functional rather than fancy, but reliable. (I notice he's even put in code for invalid entries, but haven't tested it.)

• Quick Instructions
• More Details
• Speeds
• Phrasing
• Sample .WAV
• Speed Results, Summary
• Speed, Early Experiments
• Comments

Quick Instructions

Enter the text on the page as the form says. Hit "Translate".

Copy the resulting text into a text-to-speech program such as Cepstral. It has to recognize SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language, similar to HTML and XML. More here: http://www.cepstral.com/cgi-bin/support?page=ssml )

Press "Play."

More Details

The program replaces spaces with the "break" command. Not sure what he did with other whitespace or what happens if there is more than one space in a row. (He also did dishes that night, so I didn't get too picky.)

It adds more time after periods and other punctuation. When typing, leave out the period after "Mr". (That follows modern British punctuation.)

I use Cepstral's SwiftTalker. http://www.cepstral.com/downloads/

They have an online demo at http://www.cepstral.com/demos/ that sends you a wav file.

To get SwiftTalker, download and install any of their free voices; it gets installed with the voice. If using a free voice, it sticks "buy me" in every now and then.

SwiftTalker will play it immediately or save to a wav file. (File / Export) Audacity or Nero should be able to convert it to MP3 or a CD or whatever.

You may have to go into "tools / options / text handling " so it handles SSML. You can also play around with the speed in WPM. Lots of things to play with.

Speeds

It's impossible to say which delay value will give what speed. There are too many variables.

I chose a voice, and set my goals in "delay" rather than wpm. I only convert back to wpm when talking to other humans, or when I want to increase my speed by a given amount.

This is the chart I use for converting:

The chart was made as follows:

Paragraph 7-54 from Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified, Second Edition. It claims to have 52 words. Yes, not a very large sample.

Lawrence voice at 170 wpm.

I ran it through the program to put in breaks, then exported the audio file. I then removed the "register me" messages (using Audacity), and did the math.

You'll notice that, although I told it 170wpm, it gave me 140. Other voices gave other results.

Musings

Schools count 1.4 syllables as one word, because a passage with many long words will take longer to write.

However, that doesn't give a good indication of your speed in the field.

If you're familiar with the field, you will have short forms for the longest words, so a 5-syllable word would be easier than 5 single-syllable words.

Swem himself said that cases with lots of numbers were difficult to record. You can't phrase them.

The championship speeds for literary material are much slower than for Q&A, which are slower than court proceedings. Same writers, same days. Proof that the material makes a huge difference.

Natural human speech phrases things differently than machine speech. Trust me on this one.

So, while it's useful for comparing your progress, an accurate wpm isn't really necessary this program.

If you're preparing for an exam, it's best to spend the money on their practice material for your final preparation.

Phrasing

You can omit the break between two words by replacing the space with a dash. The two words will be said together. This will reduce the total dictation time.

Sample .WAV, Summary

Here are two sample .wav files, using Cepstral's David. They are the same passage. The slower file was created at a lower frequency/quality, hence the drastic difference in file size.

rabbit300.wav

Delay of 300ms between words. File is over 3MB.

rabbit1000.wav

Delay of 1000ms between words. File is just under 1MB.

Speed Results, Summary

Cepstral's own wpm seems to use 1.4 syllables/word. (Thanks sidhetaba for those experiments.)

The free David voice at a delay of 750 and wpm of 170 (the default) gives 45-50 wpm.

If you experiment, please add your observations in the comment field. I will merge them into the text as I have time.

Speeds, Early Experiments

My first experiments used a piece 70 words long, 89 syllables, for an SI of 1.27. Cepstral was set at 170wpm.

Any speed over 100wpm can be done through Cepstral rather than this program, which saves a step.

If anyone can fit a formula showing words, syllables (or SI), and delay to get a given WPM, I'd appreciate it.

Feedback is wanted. If you want to email rather than comment here, see the sidebar.

Comments