Exploring Conferences: Speaking at Meet-ups, Swift Delhi 21

In the previous post, I discussed my first speaking experience at a meet-up! I loved speaking my thoughts out. So, I again, instantly applied when Swift Delhi meet-up announced the speaker submission for their next one.

The submission was about trying out Apple's Voice Control feature. I applied for a lightning talk this time because I did not have enough content to talk for 45 minutes.

Discovery Requires Experimentation

I wanted to try something new.

I showcased how cool Voice Control is by playing it on the iPad and having the presentation via the Keynotes app.

I connected my iPad to the MacBook and used QuickTime player to show the screen. The MacBook was connected to the projector via wifi, creating a set of delays. Voice Control processes the speech input, and there is latency for it to act upon the response. So, if Voice Control took 2 seconds to respond to the speech, the projector displayed the output 5 seconds later.

I was not prepared for that.

As soon as my body is put in a situation that I did not consider, like the considerable delay here, I panic.

I start sweating like anything.

I stammered and continued my talk, praising Voice Control. Still, I could sense the audience losing interest in knowing how cool it is, and in reality, it does not take so much time to "Open Photos app". This made me nervous that I could not deliver what I had in my mind, which turned out to be my first lesson about public speaking:

Anything and everything can go wrong!

This was the experience of my first (failed) lightning talk of 15 minutes! I do not have any pictures from the talk, but I still have the slides I used on the iPad!

Also, at that time, it felt like my public speaking was done. However, I learned so much about Voice Control to prepare for this presentation, which turned out to be a gold mine for my interview with the Accessibility Speech team, and I interned with Apple a year after giving this talk. 😸