Google Docs Speech-to-Text on a Phone?
A time-crunched, tight-wad writer explores her options
Greetings, fellow humans. I’m Caroline and I write fantasy and horror—my debut epic fantasy novel, The Obsidian Druid was released in April 2024. This is my newsletter.
So, I’m an idiot.
(Also, hi! How are you? How was your summer? Mine was a bit cloudy and unseasonably damp, but I had some great trips out with my family, thanks for asking!)
Anyway, yes, I’m an idiot. The kids are back to school, the house has been restored to some semblance of pre-summer order, and I’ve been sitting at my desk, sweaty with the anxiety that only self-imposed deadlines can bring. Writing projects I wanted to finish before the year is over are staring back at me from the abyss of my Google Drive, silently mocking me because they know they won’t be completed. It is almost Christmas, after all. Everyone knows that back to school means it’s almost Halloween, which means it’s almost Christmas (and all of these events will happen within a timeframe that feels roughly like a week and a half).
I tamped down the initial panic by reminding myself that I’ve always wanted to try speech-to-text software. I’ve recorded parts of stories and then retyped them in the past, so I know speaking aloud is often faster than typing (although the long pauses I have to sit through when I play these recordings back—created while I pondered the next perfect word or wondered how many times a character can shift in their seat before it becomes downright indecent—can be soul-destroying). If I wanted to finish some projects before the dreaded Christmas rush, surely the next logical step was speech-to-text. Once I’d decided this, it didn’t take me long to realise that I was, in fact, an idiot.
The Dawning of a Beautiful Fool
I didn’t know I was an idiot straight away. True idiots often don’t. Two things I did know were that I’m a tight-fisted cheapskate with no desire to spend any money right now, and I’m wedded to my old-school, no-microphone PC (I could buy a microphone, but that would go against my tight-fisted cheapskate code of ethics). This is why I began my speech-to-text adventure by researching free apps I could use on my phone. Then the idiocy crept in. I soon discovered that I already had a free app on my phone that incorporates speech-to-text. It’s called Google Docs, and it starts working when you hit the little microphone button on the keyboard. My jaw is still on the floor. Here’s where the real idiocy starts though: that little microphone thingy works with EVERYTHING. I can speech-to-text on my notes app. I can speech-to-text on WhatsApp. I could probably speech-to-text on the calculator (okay, I just checked that, and it’s not really a thing. Also, why would it be? Come on, people, get serious).
Image by Sammy-Sander from Pixabay
I searched Pixabay for “idiot” and this came up. The hair and expression are scarily accurate.
Once I’d gotten over the fact that I’ve owned an Android phone forever and never knew it did this (and why didn’t anyone tell me?), I decided to try it out. Here’s my first effort:
So this is using speech-to-text and it's working really well it is probably the simplest way for a tight wad such as myself to do this on a phone it seems to cut out quite quickly if I pause to have a little thinking break there's probably a setting I can change to fix that although having to take a fraction of a second to tap the microphone icon again isn't the hardest thing to do in the world.
It’s good, right? The lack of punctuation makes it read like stream of consciousness on sedatives, but at least it’s spelled correctly.
I tried again after reading up on how to add punctuation, and I actually got most of it to work. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to underline or italicise text with just the power of my voice, but I’ve mastered new paragraphs, commas, and full stops. I should be given a certificate or something.
So, I’ll be trialing speech-to-text on my phone for the next week. It will be interesting to see if writing this way will actually make the process any faster.
And please, for the love of Cthulhu, let me know I’m not the only person on the planet who’s never wondered what that little microphone thingy did (I asked my daughter if she used it and she just laughed at me, which I don’t think is a good sign).
Micro-SPFNO - Week Eight
Shining a light on some excellent indie fantasy novels that weren’t chosen to compete in the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off by reviewing their first chapters.
Sea of Souls by N. C. Scrimgeour
Sea of Souls is a fantasy adventure saturated in Scottish folklore. In just the first chapter, I encountered selkies, a will-o’-the-wisp, and mention of a nasty infestation of sirens (there’s also a helpful glossary in the front with an Animals and Creatures section). Here’s the blurb:
Dark be the water, and darker still the creatures that lurk within…
Free-spirited Isla Blackwood has never accepted the shackles of her family’s nobility. Instead, she sails the open waters, searching for belonging on the waves.
But when tragedy forces Isla home, she realises she can no longer escape the duty she’s been running from. Selkie raiders plague the island’s coasts, and when they strike at Blackwood Estate, Isla has no choice but to flee with her hot-headed brother and their brooding swordmaster.
To reclaim her home, Isla will have to set aside her grief and join forces with an exiled selkie searching for a lost pelt. The heirloom might be the key to stopping the raids—but only if they can steal it from the island’s most notorious selkie hunter, the Grand Admiral himself.
Caught between a promise to the brother she abandoned and a friendship with the selkie who should have been her enemy, Isla soon realises the open seas aren’t the only treacherous waters she’ll need to navigate.
As enemies close in, she must decide where her loyalties lie if she wants to save what’s left of her family—and find the belonging she’s been searching for.
If you were ever a disillusioned youth desperate to break free and make their own way in the world, Sea of Souls’s lyrical opening lines will speak to you. Aged eighteen, Isla escaped her damp and rainy home to work as a ship’s navigator and travel the world. She felt she was where she was supposed to be, but now a disquieting letter from her mother is summoning her home for the first time in seven years.
The blurb promises high-seas adventure, which is a genre I love, so learning that (for the first chapter, at least) Isla is about to step back on land for the first time in years would usually have disappointed me. Not so here. The first thing she sees is a will-o’-the-wisp bobbing in the waters before her home island of Silveckan, an omen that she takes to mean she’s too late and her mother has died. Suddenly, I’m fascinated by this island, “an old land filled with old magic”, and can’t wait for Isla to disembark.
As much as I appreciated the brooding descriptions of Silveckan, I enjoyed the descriptions of people even more. In a few succinct phrases, Scrimgeour can paint a complex portrait. Isla’s skin has “turned bone-pale once more, so leached of colour she could see the blue-green webbing of her veins underneath”, and her brother has “sprouted tall and grown into the chiseled edge of his jawline”.
Isla is a character who’s easy to root for. By returning to Silveckan, she’s doing what she thinks is right even though she desperately doesn’t want to. You can really feel how leaving the ship is a terrible wrench, but by the time she’s arrived at her family’s estate, you’re already urging her through the doors. There are questions that need to be answered, after all. Why are the islanders so afraid of selkies? Why did Isla leave, and what did her mother want to tell her before she died?
This is a well-paced first chapter that gives you an immediate overview of Isla’s character and plunges you straight into the story. The prose is beautiful without becoming purple or flowery, and the bleak setting promises magic and weirdness. This one’s definitely going on my TBR list.
Favourite line: “She’d tasted the spray on her lips and swallowed it along with the promise of the horizon. The promise of something out of reach, waiting for her to claim it.”
Sea of Souls is available in hardback, paperback, and on Kindle Unlimited.
Midnight Metropolis is a sci-fi/fantasy novel about daemons, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and the neon megacity sprawled on the blackened backside of a sunless planet. New chapters are posted every Friday and you can read all available chapters for free.
That’s it for now.
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