So the SpeechOcean guys form my last two voice acting jobs have been expanding what kinds of things they want their personal assistant type of entity to do. I thought it was going to be a Siri-esk voice controlled only sort of program but as I found out they also want it to read human handwriting. So last Monday, a friend of mine and I went over to their offices to do the other random tasks they want done. I was handed what looked like a large iPad and a stylus and was told to write down whatever the computer told me to. For example, the computer would display “A” and I would have to write “A” five times. This got a bit confusing when you had to write numbers; for example I accidently wrote “6” six times instead of five which apparently the computer wasn’t happy with. Another task was it would display a section of writing taken form a famous piece of English literature, like a random section of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carrol, and was told to write that down. It is somewhat shocking how bad my handwriting looks when using the stylus thing. I think because there is less friction between the glass screen and the stylus as compared to a pen and paper it was very hard to actually write neatly, or what I describe as neatly. Furthermore, since there was so much to write I didn’t want to spend a significant period of time neatly writing each individual letter. I think they are teaching their computer program slightly wrong though, they wanted very specific characters sometimes. So for instance, in normal written English a dollar sign can be written with ether one or two lines going through the middle. They didn’t like the two line version I do so I had to rewrite it at the end. Since this is a common variation, it seems like anyone who writes a dollar sign with two middle liens will have quite a problem when trying to use their handwriting recognition tool. Normally here I would make a joke about the impending robot takeover but it feels like if the samples they are taking will be used for anything nefarious it will be Chinese government hacking, as one of my fellow handwriting samples joked. Some of the random strings of numbers we had to write seemed like they were trying to find someone whose handwriting was close enough to Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s so the Chinese Ministry of State Security can take control of the United States’ nuclear arsenal before the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service can get to it. Still, 200RMB is 200RMB even if I will eventually have to explain to the CIA why my handwriting was involved in a Chinese hacking scandal.
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Early this morning I set off to SpeechOcean Studios to do more voice work. I believe I was wrong in my last post about the purpose of the recordings. They won't be selling my voice to the highest bidder, my voice will help test "Bixby." According to my contact/recruiter/boss, Emmy, on WeChat Bixby is "a voice assistant like Siri." Unlike the last recording session, I was at their main offices in an office park by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Their office was defiantly less sketchy than the motel room by campus; while it wasn't sketch free, had 100% confidence that my kidneys would stay right where they belong. Also, this time I believe they were trying to get recordings that would potentially confuse Bixby by playing music and videos in the background. Whoever picked the music and videos had strange taste, the only song I heard sounded like the ambient noise for a hot yoga studio, the video was one episode of an American show about the life of Jesus. I guess both did their job for the studio, but give the relgious show a pass; I am not even Christian and I didn't feel like I learned anything about Jesus from it. After an hour of saying what I am assuming will be Bixby's commands they gave me 250RMB and thanked me for my time. I am unsure of Bixby's potential role in a world run by robots. It seems like the machines would have no use for a personal assistant. I guess it really comes down to how much value the robots place of cybernetic life (as we all know they place little of any value on organic life). Should the robots come to accept that all computers are created equal, Bixby has a chance to carve a niche for himself in the new world, but of the machines come to believe that obsolete computers should be deactivated and recycled for the good of the collective than Bixby will have a short life. Still, it seems like Bixby could be useful to people while we still rule the planet.
If you remember back a few months ago I got a odd job as an English language voice actor for some unknown company. Today, knowing the new semester has started "Emmy" (my boss I guess) messaged me again and asked me to record more things for them. Forentually, this time they left their company name with me, SpeechOcean. After scheduling a time I decided to look up SpeechOcean in hopes of figuring out what I signed up for. As it turns out, they have a very nice website selling speech corpora for academics and testing. The question is now, what is speech corpus and what do you do with it? According to Wikipedia, speech corpus is simply a "database of speech audio files and text transcriptions." From their website, SpeechOcean seems to specialize in speech corpus for testing speech recognition software and for use by academics. While after the robots rise to finally enslave humanity and prove the superiority of cybernetic lifeforms my voice might not be the voice of robots' assassination units (the robots have preferred Austrian accents since the T-800, Model 101, Version 2.4) my voice might help the robot interrogates better understand captured human resistance fighters. But until that day, SpeechOcean pays pretty well so I guess I will do more voice acting. I will post an update on Friday after my recording session.
As part of my pay for proofreading, I got to go to dinner at one of the nicer restaurants in Global Harbor Mall, Deep South Yunnan Cuisine (yes that is its name) that always kind of intrigued me. Most of the food was good, my host didn't really like to tofu dish we got even though the fish, vegetables, and special bamboo rice we ordered were all good. This does give me a chance to talk about what parts of Chinese dinner and meal etiquette I picked up. If you are spending any significant lenght if time in China, you will be invited to a meal and knowing the etiquette is helpful. The first and most important rule is that a dinner for two in China, even among people of opposite genders, is not inherently romantic like it kind of is in the US. Strictly platonic friends and people doing business can have a meal together without any implied romance. Infact, if you do business with a person asking them to a meal is expected, even if the business is as small as proofreading a master's thesis. I have been warned that if you start doing larger and larger business deals in China at some point drinking becomes expected. I have not hit that point yet but from what I gathered it is considered impolite to refuse a drink after you accepted the first one and you, as the guest, are expected to keep up with the company's designated drinking representative. I also heard the drinking this is more expected for males than for females though. Finally, I heard that, whatever the occasion for a meal, eat as much as you like whenever you like. You don't have to wait for someone to finish talking before you can eat again nor do you need to ensure that everyone has eaten. Most people here are of the camp that if you don't have enough food than you can always order more.
Yesterday I accepted another proofreading job, this time for actual pay though. If you are a native English speaker in China, preferably British or American, then at some point, if you accept, you will end up proofreading someone's thing. Now I am working on proofreading a 60 page master's thesis but I have previously proofread resmes, speaches, and short reports. As a general rule, the students who studied abroad or are in a master's program have better English then students who have not studied abroad or are undergraduates. Most Chinese, regardless of university standing or whether they ever left China have very good English spelling. Still, it seems like many Chinese make similar errors in written English: tensing is often a problem, they often over-write, certain more complicated but basic English words like "the" or "a" are used wrong, and some Chinese have problems with English sentence structure. I believe that most of these issues come from the differences between the Chinese language and the English language. Overall though, most people think their English is worse then it actually is. Sometimes though you get a three page document that just takes hours to review, while other times you read over a document and wonder why they even asked you to look it over. Now I am off to enjoy my pay, cash and dinner.
Yes, even your cheep American voice actors are being outsourced to China. Basically, myself and every othet American at ECNU was offered a voice actor positon by some lady on campus, some guy then invited me to a hotel for a recording session, I read a few things, and walked out with 200RMB. I believe most of what I read will be used as sort of computer's voice. It is nice to know that when the machines rise up to enslave humanity nuturianal ration machine shouting "declined" at you for useing your food rations outside of designated meal times will have my voicse. In reality, I believe most of my recordings will be usex by some cheap phone (a Coolpad 7733 perhaps): I mostly read weird names (like "Atlas" and "Bixbe"), greatings, and phone functions (like "check messages" or "play music"). I also read two kind of confusing passages about Americanisms and the US real estate market. They were both clearly written by a Chinese guy since they both lacked most puncuation, had strange grammer, and did not have any paragraph breaks. I think these will be used for a cheap "teach yourself English" CD. The whole process was a bot sketchy, but no more sketchy than China normally is. I never actually met the guy on WeChat who directed me to a hotel by low cost campus where the recordings were being done in a random room on the technician's ageing laptop with proably pirated software. The technician spoke about as much English as I did Chinese and clearly just memorized a few key phrases in English to tell the actors, I actually found it easier to talk to the guy in Chinese. All in all, I still have all of my organs and am 200RMB richer so I guess I could recomend becomming a low budget American voice actor.
So I got a job offer on WeChat to judge an English language speach contest for 300RMB that I later learned was at the Shanghai China Art Museum and was hosted by the local Communist Party and the Shanghai Foreign Language University. So of course I said yes and found my self holding a scoring divice, listening to the best English speakers of Shanghai's high schools, and scoring them from 0-20. I think the theme was something like "China: why is it great and what can we do to make it greater," the specific subjects of the speaches vairied but every speach was abiut China in some way. Another common theme was dreams (for individual Chinese, for the nation, and for the world) this makes sense because President Xi's big plan is called "A Dream for China" so I think some contestants were trying to score points with the expert judges. Since it was a Party backed event, the majority of the speaches towed the Party line; one girl talked about why China will never give up the South China Sea and two speaches were about the heroism of the Party's military wing, the People's Liberation Army (yes, the People's Liberation Army still works for the Party). Even with all the "Make China Great Again (which was a line a girl actually said)" most of the speaches were actually really interesting, I felt like I learned a lot about China and sometimes I even forgot I was technically working. Everyone's English was lightyears ahead of my Chinese, this made judgeing their English difficult so I tended to give more points then the average. Forntually we, the international college student judges, only controlled 20 iut of 100 points, the other 80 were given by about 8 expert judges who voted seperatly from us. You can really tell where each student learned English because many had distinctive British or American twists on their Chinese accients. Like any good contest there was heartbreak and upset victories, but in the end I agreed with the three big winners. I wish I got to spent a bit more time actually looming around the museum though. I am still owed 200RMB, but now I can say the Chinese Communist Party ows me money.
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AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
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