On completion of this training sequence,
you will be able to use your voice as a tool to produce high quality subtitles.
In particular, you are going to learn about how to use it
to support flawless dictation through voice projection,
pacing, articulation and voice modulation.
This is the agenda of this presentation.
Voice projection is strictly related to breathing.
It is the use of voice
in a way that the person to whom you are talking listens to you.
When respeaking, you need to talk to a machine.
In normal talking, we use the upper part of our lungs,
while in respeaking we need to use belly breathing as automatically as possible,
so as to be able and respeak on the long run.
This means
that your voice projection should be regular and well-balanced,
as it is aimed at excellent use of voice commands
in a manner that the machine can consistently listen to your voice
as you trained it.
To do this,
you need to keep practicing belly breathing and speaking at the same time.
When speaking or respeaking,
try to see if you manage to reduce the number of recognition errors
by avoiding ups and downs in the volume.
In particular, pay attention to thinking all sentences
as if they needed a raising tone; articulating properly;
avoiding sudden accelerating your dictation, and avoiding ups and downs in your dictation,
but more importantly avoid talking to the machine
the way you talk to humans, as in this demo of mine.
I am not a native speaker of English, so don't focus on the way I pronounce words.
Rather, try to imitate the way I project my voice.
Pacing is the rate at which each of us speaks.
In public speaking, they teach you to vary your speaking speed.
Avoid doing this.
As we have seen in the previous section,
you need to talk to the machine the most robotic way possible.
This allows for a good speech recognition.
Pacing plays an important role in respeaking,
as it is your capacity to speak clearly at a given speech rate.
To understand how quickly you can talk, try and shadow the TV news,
a parliamentary speech or a fast-rate webinar.
In respeaking, pacing has to be adapted to the speaker’s rate constantly.
Articulation is strictly related to pacing
as you should not only speak quickly to keep the same pace as the speaker.
You should also speak in a clear and distinctive manner,
so that the machine can transcribe the words we have in mind
and not words that sound similar.
To do this, keep an eye on the articulation rules in your language.
This is extremely important to reduce recognition errors while respeaking.
To do so, it is sometimes necessary to change the way you pronounce a word
through macros or other peculiar ways of articulating words,
as per Element number 4.
Always keep track of special articulation so as to make the most out of it.
As a rule of thumb, valuable for many languages,
remember to always articulate all syllables in a word
and all words in a sentence the way they should,
and not as you do it in your daily life, if this changes the way they are pronounced.
With polycentric languages like English, this also means you need to check
if the automatic speech recognition software that you use can be adjusted to your accent.
In this case, be consistent with this standard
and do not change the way you articulate depending on the accent of the speaker.
Also, avoid stressing syllables too much,
as a machine is not a human being.
In case of possibly ambiguous words,
pronounce the word without stressing a given syllable too much
as in many languages vowel length can make the difference between two words,
as in “shot” and “short”.
Finally, voice modulation is the use you make of your voice
in terms of volume and tone.
In human conversation you adapt it to the message or effect you want to convey.
In respeaking, this means to be consistent with the three aspects
we have dealt with in the previous sections
and keep modulation as robotic as possible.
This may seem easy, but it can be a challenge with emotional speakers,
as you may tend to imitate them.
If you realise the number of recognition errors increases,
a wrong voice modulation may be the reason.
In this video lecture, we have seen how important it is
to make a good use of your voice while breathing, so as to support dictation.
In particular, we have seen how to command voice projection,
pacing, articulation and voice modulation to avoid as many recognition errors
while trying to subtitle challenging speakers.