Meredith Patterson
Appearances
Radiolab
The Echo in the Machine
Well, let me back up. When we began with this voice writing line of work, the computer software wanted to hear you sounding like a computer.
Radiolab
The Echo in the Machine
Absolutely. That would sound like something like this, comma, something that is very articulate and also very robotic, hyphen sounding period. Very quick, sometimes clipped. I hear you laughing. I know. This is how we spoke for hours and hours of our day.
Radiolab
The Echo in the Machine
Yes, because there were certain difficult words for the software to distinguish. For example, in, an, and and.
Radiolab
The Echo in the Machine
It could be difficult to speak like a normal person after leaving. This job really did change me.
Radiolab
The Echo in the Machine
Commaphones could be very difficult for the software. Two, two, and two, for example.
Radiolab
The Echo in the Machine
Tuku for T-W-O, toodaloo for T-O-O. So if a sentence is, she has two daughters in college, too, I would echo that as, she has tuku daughters in Lake College, comma, toodaloo, period.
Radiolab
The Echo in the Machine
she has tuku daughter zinli college, tutulu. I mean, it's a whole language that you then have to remember and follow.
Radiolab
The Echo in the Machine
So, for example, Back when George W. Bush was still in office, that's how he was referred to on the air. George W. period Bush.
Radiolab
The Echo in the Machine
And so... I trained my software to print George W. Bush when I said GB.
Radiolab
The Echo in the Machine
Hillary Clinton became Hilco. Barack Obama became Bombo. Rudy Giuliani at the time was Ruju.
Radiolab
The Echo in the Machine
The word garage. Because when you're captioning local news, a lot of things happen in the garage. The fire started in the garage. The man hid in the garage.
Radiolab
The Echo in the Machine
I think the best voice writers really learned how to move with the software almost like dancing. Because it wasn't enough to just tell the software how to respond to you. You needed to respond to it to really achieve the highest accuracies when you were on the air.