Sunday, May 19, 2019

Turning on "Read" for Pages

All the time I've been using Pages on my Mac I had not been aware until recently about the edit option on the drag-down menu that allows speech. I gave this a try.

I now have mixed feelings about using this option. On the one hand, it can help find typos that Spell Check won't find. In one of my stories, I caught that I had typed "tired" when I meat "tried." I had looked at the printed copy many times and didn't catch this. But when the speaker read this line "...the cat tired to sneak out. ..." I became aware I'd made this typo. Similarly, in another story, I saw that I had typed "tow" instead of "two." And in another passage, I saw that I had omitted a necessary word as the computer read the text.

On the other hand, it can get annoying listening to the text being read. And of course there will be words the computer doesn't know how to pronounce. It had not clue how to pronounce Farrah Fawcett's first name, for one thing. Seems easy to understand that one. But it also read the symbol # as "number," rather than "hashtag." That was surprising, since almost everyone these days uses the symbol to mean "hashtag."  And it's just a machine, incapable of detecting the voice intonation implied by dialogue. 

Who has tried this? I'm not sure how often I will be using this method. But I think it will be helpful once in a while. 

3 comments:

Elephant's Child said...

I haven't tried it. Did you use it for this post? If so, it isn't perfect.
A big hooray for expanding your repetoire of tools.

Sandra said...

Interesting. Catching the typos would be helpful, but I'm thinking it would take some getting used to.

Jamie Ghione said...

No, I didn't use it n this post.