Text with Feeling

19 Dec 2018 at 18:09 // under misc

Ken Perlin wrote a blog post yesterday about transcribing speech to text:

Yet converting speech to text, even when done perfectly, inevitably loses something. Even if the text you end up with is a faithful transcription of your words, it fails to capture your tone and intonation.

I wonder whether there could be a visual representation of computer-transcribed speech that somehow adds back this missing information. Perhaps the visual representation of this affective information would be some combination of text color, word spacing, font size and style, background shade, or other characteristics.

My initial thoughts on reading about changing the colours, spacing and styles of the text was "please no!". As a dyslexic, I have enough trouble reading regular text. I really struggle to read newspapers with their justified text and odd word spacing.

But thinking about it further, we already have a way of coding tone and pace of words.

Sheet music

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