Machine Reading
There are overwhelming numbers of blog posts to read. I want to read everything; everything about design, technology, and self-improvement topics. I’ve been bookmarking many articles to read whenever I have time. As a slow reader, I put my headphones on and listen to them while doing house chores.
I can listen to a few articles while sweeping at the backyard, and the best time listening is when I have to bulk ironing my shirts. Ironing is not my favourite activity and takes a while; this is my time of killing two birds with one stone.
The problem is that the machine reads the articles with monotone voices without any emotion because they don’t understand the context. Therefore, it doesn’t know which words to emphasize. It’s different listening to these from podcasts or news anchors, and listening to these articles require extra concentration to understand. Sometimes the voice makes me sleepy, and I fall asleep while I’m playing.
I listen while I go for a walk, but my thoughts take over the machine voice after a while. I try listening to it again, and then my thoughts take over. I was intrigued by the article headline, but not the article? Or does the voice make the writing dull? I listen to it carefully when I replay the article. If I lost it again at the same spot or cannot pick up any exciting keywords, I skip it and go to the next item.
The machine(mobile or tablet) reads articles for me is a useful feature, but lack of emotion is the problem because there is no context with the device. We can express our feeling with tone and understand even the visual is unavailable. If an author can describe its feelings in writing, that would be great; even the monotone voice can represent the author’s feeling? How is the difference between machine-reading and reading the article with your eyes?
P.S. I used to listen to the Medium audio, are they gone now? I didn’t notice until recently. There weren’t many audio stories that I was interested in but still better than machine reading articles.
