What Is Text to Speech?
Text to speech is a newly improving technology that reads the written content aloud for users. The usage areas of text to speech software expands, including social media platforms, websites, and even the education field.
What is Text to Speech’s Purpose?
Text to speech aims to help people who have learning disabilities such as dyslexia, struggling with reading, and being visually impaired. But of course, everyone who would like to benefit from this newly developing technology.
Why is Text to Speech Beneficial for Students
There are many different learning methods, and everyone has a preference for different learning styles such as visual, kinesthetic, or auditory.
For students inclined to visual or kinesthetic learning styles, it can be difficult to read the studying content all the time.
Why You Should Consider Using Text to Speech as a Student
Even if you are fine with reading your texts, sometimes making changes while studying can improve your comprehension. As a result, text to speech can be effectively beneficial for your school life.
How Text to Speech is a Good Idea for Medical Students?
Instead of studying by reading all the content, they are able to listen to it by using text to speech features as if an instructor teaches them. So that, they can comprehend the content in a shorter time by listening to it.
How to Use Text to Speech in Medical School
Text to speech feature makes it possible to listen to text on websites, slide shows, PDFs, and Microsoft Word documents as well as the many other sources medical students use.
Benefits of Text to Speech for Medical Students
There are numerous benefits to text to speech for medical students . Some of them are:
- Saving time
- Getting familiar with spoken terminology
- Better comprehension
1- Saving Time
Medical students should study various fields in colleges such as anatomy, physiology, neurology, and dermatology. Studying all these and more courses by reading might be overwhelming and last too long.
Listening instead of reading is much faster and more beneficial because it decreases studying hours while increasing efficiency.
2- Getting Familiar with Spoken Terminology
After graduating from medical school, students will be interacting with patients and other doctors and most of these interactions will be spoken, not written.
There are almost many terminologies in medical school and most of them are Latin. So, doctor candidates should be able to be familiar with hearing these words. And the best way to be familiar is to listen to them constantly.
3- Better Comprehension
Sometimes reading too much might be tiring and at some point, your comprehension will decrease. Especially students who are in trouble with learning abilities, such as dyslexia, cannot really process the written knowledge.
In these and such situations, listening to the information will provide you with better comprehension.
4- Reducing the Effort
Listening takes less time compared to reading. Especially if the text is written in another language than your native language, reading takes hours. However, thanks to toning and emphasizing via voice, listening to the same text takes less time and helps better comprehension.
So, the effort ratio is decreasing, and students get less tired.
Text to Speech Tips for Medical Students
Using text to speech with readily prepared documents such as instructors’ notes, PDFs, or slide shows is easier because they are probably prepared carefully in terms of dictation and punctuation.
What If You Are Using Your Own Notes with Text to Speech?
But if you are taking your own notes in the classes, you might want to pay attention to some points in order to use text to speech properly:
- Using proper punctuation
- Being careful about your spelling
1- Use Proper Punctuation
Using proper punctuation such as commas and periods will make the text to speech able to detect sentences and vocalize accordingly.
Also, punctuation at the end of the sentence might change the tone of the whole sentence as well as the meaning of the sentence. For example, using exclamation points will add excitement feeling to the sentence. So, you will understand what is being vocalized more correctly.
If you do not put the comma in the right place, you will be confused while listening to the text. Sometimes the place of a comma can change the whole meaning of the sentence, especially with clauses.
2- Be Careful About Your Spelling
When text to speech technology reads a misspelled word, it might sound like another word. But as the misspelled word won’t fit in the context, you are quite likely to be confused. That is why you should be careful about how you emphasize syllables and toning.
How to Prevent Misspellings?
To prevent misspellings in written text, you can also use different spell-checking programs or extensions. For example, Microsoft Word proposes its own spell-checking extension on its app. You can add it to your Microsoft Office programs for checking.
