Alone again, part 2

Dec. 19 – I was alone again this afternoon. Ann left for New York, and Tom had wrap-up work to do at the condo before vacation could really begin for him.

I didn’t have much energy to do anything. I laid on the couch, sobbing.

Now that I’ve had company, I realize that being alone during this recovery is not good for me.

I thought at least I could answer some emails. I’ve had so many since this happened.

Working on the computer for any length of time is still difficult. But, thanks to the speech recognition built into my iPhone, I can dictate. I use this function a lot and it seems as though the software has learned my voice.

Today it wasn’t working. It was as though I had become someone else. As though even my voice had changed. This just made me cry harder.

It seems crazy, choking out sentences like, “I’m doing much better,” and “The doctors tell me I’ll be fine,” while crying. The sentences were true, and I didn’t sugar-coat any of my emails.

But I could listen to myself – my words and my sobs – and hear the whole picture of my recovery.

There were a lot of mistakes in the text spewed out by the dictation function.

I don’t even sound like myself. Won’t I ever be normal again?

More crying.

Then I got a grip. This speech recognition on my phone is not personalized. So the mistakes in the text weren’t happening because I don’t sound like myself.

Somewhere in the cloud, where speech is converted to text, my words and phrases become part of all the data. And the software continues to improve because of all these users.

But it hasn’t learned my voice, in particular. In fact it’s the other way around: I’ve learned how to speak so that the speech recognition understands.

And I just couldn’t do it today.

The penny for the day is a 2012, because I dictated 12 emails.