VOICE-TO-TEXT FOLLIES

About ten years ago, bothered by tingling sensations in my feet, I visited Dr. Maeda, a Japanese neurologist working at UCLA Medical Center. Using a device that measured the response of my lower legs, he gave me a diagnosis of peripheral neuropathy. Further testing revealed that it was non-diabetic and idiopathic, meaning that it had no known cause. He told me that I would gradually lose sensation in my feet and hands. “Yours is the slow kind,” he said, whereas the diabetic form was faster. I asked him if there were instances where it simply slowed down or stopped progressing. Yes, he said, that is possible.

He suggested vitamin supplements and gave me a look of compassion I’ve not forgotten.

For some years I found the peripheral neuropathy a minor distraction. There was some encroaching numbness and itching but little pain. It didn’t alter my function in any critical ways. At one point I tried acupuncture treatments, and while it noticeably improved my chi, it didn’t really bite into the neuropathy, which seemed to move on a different track. I didn’t find any other treatment particularly useful. Life went on.

Then several years ago, I began having some falls. I also noticed that my fingers weren’t as nimble when I was typing on the laptop, an essential activity to me as a writer. One day I was in a government office filling out a form which required my signature and discovered I had trouble signing my name.

Meanwhile, the falls increased, along with unsteadiness, imbalance. By the end of last year, I’d reached a point where walking unassisted was perilous, and typing was reduced to one-finger pecking.

Enter voice-to-text programs. I’m presently using Google Docs’s resident “voice typing” program, as it’s called. I speak into my laptop and it turns it into text. When you say ‘period” it makes a period; same for commas, semi-colons, colons, and dashes. Quotation marks and parentheses you have to insert by hand. The program is impressive but still makes a lot of mistakes.

No matter which program you use, you’ll need to go back in and correct errors. Spanish, for example, tends to uniformly spell words the way they sound. This isn’t true of English, which has many variations of sound, a result of its polyglot origins. Rough ruff. Through threw. Choose chews. And sometimes the program arbitrarily decides to capitalize a word in the middle of a sentence. It can’t handle foreign names or terms very well. Constantinople comes out correctly but Isfahan comes out east fahon. Baton Rouge come out correctly but Yokohama doesn’t.

Many people who have full capacity are using voice-to-text programs. It’s faster than writing, although some find that the words they choose tend to be different when speaking rather than writing. (But then both Henry James and Dostoyevsky dictated novels to secretaries who transcribed them. Dostoevsky married his.)

Other programs simply allow you to record your voice without turning it into text. This is an option I also use. But for these weekly Substack posts, for example, or emails longer than a sentence, I rely upon the voice typing program. Recording is speedy but going back in and cleaning it up is laborious and time-consuming. Still, it works - kind of. And I can’t help but think what a boon these programs must be to people who are in worse shape than I am.