Modern speech-to-text AI features algorithmic “diarization,” meaning it can automatically figure out who is saying what, when – even during a chaotic conversation between multiple people. But this amazing technology does nothing for the screenwriter because every “person” in our conversations is actually voiced by us – and our one voice. Because writers write alone, today’s automatic speech-to-text software does not solve our problem of diarization.
All speech–to–text gives us is a long block of transcribed text, requiring us to go through the words and manually break it up into many chunks of dialog and action. From the reading of words alone it is very easy to mistake who was supposed to say what. To mitigate this weak spot, script assistants also needed to listen to the audio tapes while reading the transcription output in order to double-check any unclear diarization changes of dialog speaker.
However, not every writer is also a great actor like Harold Pinter was, so the script assistants who listened to the audio tapes sometimes still struggled to figure out “who says what when” and could not tell when the “Action lines” began or ended. If the writer was not acting broadly enough, a common outcome was guessing wrong and mixing up the scene.
For people who wanted to cut down on diarization errors, there were no good solutions. No writer wants to utter clunky voice commands like “action line” or “character name Jim” before each line of dialogue in order to format aloud. Storytellers don’t want anything that bucks us out of our creative flow-state or knocks us off the story’s pace.
Constantly having to say the name of the character is just as annoying (and needlessly time-consuming) as having to say “tab-tab.” Some systems annoyingly even require writers to say the name of each punctuation mark aloud.
Thankfully, technology has become better since the early 2000s. Today’s speech-to-text AI now comes with 95% accuracy, and very intelligent automatic grammar and spell-check. Nevertheless, since the invention of the Talking Draft Method almost one-hundred years ago, it has been clear that screenwriters and playwrights needed some sort of manual diarization. We needed to be able to note, with our hands, who says what when as we improvised our scenes.
Many solutions to this problem have been tried over the decades. In each, the writer records themselves “acting-out” the scene’s dialogue and narrating the action lines, meanwhile her hands manipulate different machines. Some writers tried to use stenography hardware but found that the learning curve was too steep and required too much focus on the hands instead of the storytelling.
Other screenwriters recorded themselves to tape for speech-to-text processing while their hands pressed speaker label buttons on a custom timestamping device. But all of these require the writer to listen through the tape again watching the timestamps while looking at the speech-to-text output in order to actually format the script. This was such a slow and laborious process that when the custom time-stamping software did not survive the retirement of Windows 95, it was for the better.
Now that technologists have a better understanding of what Hollywood screenwriters have been doing to hack solutions to the problem of manual diarization, there is finally specialized software dedicated to the Talking Draft Method. No writer needs to hire a personal assistant or amanuensis to do the Talking Draft Method ever again.
www.TalkingDraft.com achieves flawless manual diarization by combining the best ideas from previous solutions to create the only way to write a perfect Talking Draft on the fly. Today, thanks to this new technology, one of classic Hollywood’s best-kept secrets can be anyone’s secret weapon for a fast first draft.
What had taken Howard Hawks’ script assistants over 100 combined hours to accomplish in a week (transcribing the text, achieving proper dialogue diarization, changing some of the dictated text into Action lines, adding Scene Location “slug” lines, and adding character names before their correct lines of dialogue) now happens instantly. www.TalkingDraft.com has eliminated all of those post-recording steps which have long bothered Hollywood transcription script assistants.
With www.TalkingDraft.com, rather than have your transcribed text get painstakingly reformatted by hand later, you format it and manually diarize the dialog as you improvise your scene’s first draft. This innovation fully automates the time-tested and time-saving screenwriting method that was proudly used by some of the greatest writers to ever work the craft.