Speak and Spell

摘要

If I've written you an email on my phone lately, you might have noticed something slightly off about it. It doesn't read like email from me used to. I use fewer contractions, fewer adverbs, and I'm more likely to ramble. What's changed is that, a year ago, I discovered that Android and Apple phones have become so good at transcription, it's now much faster for me to talk than type. (And that's saying a lot: I was a fast phone-typist.) So while sending texts and emails or using chat apps on my phone, I started talking it out-then quickly cleaning up any wrong words. There are shockingly few. I'd estimate that fully two-thirds of all messages I compose on my phone are now spoken. I'm probably an extreme case-but only for now. People are rapidly adopting voice-writing. Nuance, a leading firm running cloud-transcription services for mobile devices, processes 48 percent more voice than it did a year ago, with an average accuracy of 95 percent. That's convenient and futuristic-sounding. But it's also going to change the way we write. For one, it may make our prose more casual. One small study of correspondence between two academics in 2003 found that when one of them shifted to voice- dictation software, his sentences became a bit shorter, he used status markers like "sir" and "boss" less often, and he was more likely to use first-person pronouns. "People are more personal when they're speaking," says James Pennebaker, a social psychologist who coauthored the research.