The Great Cleanup
Using A.I. to cheat my way through cleaning up dictated text, sorry not sorry
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
Recently I dumped a dictated file into otter.ai to get a transcript. I’m not the most eloquent when I’m dictating, so I know I’ll have to spend a bit of time cleaning up the result, if not completely rewriting it.
Then I thought: why make it so hard on myself?
I dumped the raw text from otter into ChatGPT 4.0.
I want to share the comparison because I think these are the best use cases that often get overlooked in all the furious arguments about A.I.
The original transcript as exported out of otter, with zero cleanup:
There was no one solution to fit every student's needs, comma, because even if someone is legally blind, there are many ways to be legally blind. And some students
needed full screen readers for everything that they did, while other blind students rarely use them, and instead relied on magnification for the most part it wasn't my job to tell them what they should use, but rather to find out what best suited them and help them be more productive and successful college students.
When I started the job
I had a general familiarity with a lot of assistive technologies, accessible technologies which back then were called assistive technologies, period, screen readers comma voice to text dictation tools, comma modified equipment, comma and digital ebook readers period.
The cleaned up version, no edits by me:
There was no one solution to fit every student's needs, because even if someone is legally blind, there are many ways to be legally blind. Some students needed full-screen readers for everything they did, while other blind students rarely used them, instead relying on magnification. For the most part, it wasn't my job to tell them what they should use, but rather to find out what would best suit them and help them be more productive and successful college students.
When I started the job, I had a general familiarity with a lot of accessible technologies (which back then were called assistive technologies), included screen readers, voice-to-text dictation tools, modified equipment, and digital ebook readers.
The difference is almost subtle, but represents a savings of several minutes of work. Overall, the full 1,700 word essay (which I’ll be posting next Monday) was dictated and edited in a fraction of the time it would have needed had I “written by hand” from the start.
Note that the final versions of those paragraphs will actually be a bit different, as I went through and clarified some statements and expounded on others. The A.I. cleanup was far from perfect, but, as you can tell, it was substantial enough that using it for the first step saved a lot of time and (more importantly IMHO) energy.
That said, the very first run through failed because I just asked it to “clean up” the transcript, and it gave me a highly truncated version which was, indeed, very clean but also half as long. Not ideal. 😑
Therefore my advice is that if you plan on doing this, make sure you specify in your prompt that by “clean up” you mean correcting sentences, grammar, and errors, not streamlining or doing heavy editing.
And, of course, expect that you will still need to go through and re-edit to correct mistakes and make sure that not too much of your own voice was lost. If there is one thing I can say about A.I. generated/edited text, it is very, very generic in tone.
This represents a major step forward in my dictation process because one drawback of dictation for me has always been the cleanup. Since most of my dictation happens when I’m out walking, I just have the raw .mp3 file to work from, as opposed to making a very clean first draft in Google Docs or using Dragon Naturally Speaking.
Now I can get a very clean first draft in just a couple of seconds using ChaptGPT, and that’s worth a lot.
Find KimBoo: Notes • Bluesky • Tumblr • Facebook • House of York
Support Keely!!! 🐶: Ko-fi • PayPal
In all the brouhaha and divisiveness about AI, we can miss that there are also benefits. Granted, as noted in the article, the prompt has to be precise, but this is a use that can open all kinds of possibilities for good writers who simply can't hire a professional editor. Am I talking myself out of job? Nope. Good editors will always be needed for the content and subtleties of language that AI can NEVER catch. But if you need a basic "clean-up," go for it! I also don't mind that this will require editors to "up our game" in terms of knowledge, professionalism, customer service.
There is definitely a place for AI (and has been for decades already, which many seem unaware of). As long as we don't use it as a substitution for creativity, I have no problem with it.