how to get voice recordings and transcribed and into a PIM as text notes

Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 18, 2011 at 02:08 PM

jimspoon wrote:
>I want to way to convert digital recorder voice files into PIM text notes with as little
>work as possible. More specifically, I want to be able to use voice recognition as a
>time tracker tool. Whereever I am, I want to be able to dictate what I am doing or have
>just done into a voice recorder, and later end up with a series of time-stamped text
>notes - ideally it would go straight into a personal information management program,
>or could easily be imported into one.

If these are just short notes (2 or 3 sentences), you could use the Dragon app on iPhone/iPod Touch and then paste them into the Notes app, which timestamps them for you and also syncs with Gmail, where you can add labels (tags) to organise them further. This is a very quick and easy process. You can also correct the text in Notes (and to some limited extent in the Dragon app). Longer texts wouldn’t work as well because I think there is a limited amount of text the app can handle and also you can’t see the text while dictating (as opposed to the desktop version), so there could be more mistakes to correct afterwards.

>I’ve been looking at reviews of Dragon
>Naturally Speaking Premium, which will attempt to recognize speech in audio files
>imported from a voice recorder, and transcribe them into text. DNS apparently is not
>as accurate in recognizing recorded speech as it is in recognizing real-time speech
>dictated into a microphone at the computer. One user says the correction process
>isn’t easy, either. I don’t know anything about how one would get text transcriptions
>out of DNS and into a PIM. There are lots of complains about tech support provided by
>Nuance, which sells DNS.

Dragon on the desktop is a very complex and sensitive animal, so it requires some initial investment of time and effort to learn about it and to train it and mould it to your needs. The quality of the transcription will depend on a lot of things, including how clearly you speak, the type of vocabulary and the amount of background noise. Once the recording is fed into the software, it outputs the file as RTF, so any outliner or notetaking software that can import it would work. But clearly there would be a discrepancy in terms of timestamping between the time of recording and transcription (unless you record that as well).

If you use Windows 7, you may not need additional software to organise the notes. You could just save the transcribed RTF files into a Windows folder, and then in Windows Explorer select the file preview pane and presto!

However, beware: the latest Dragon version requires an up-to-date computer, lots of RAM and computing power and it generally doesn’t like many other programmes running at the same time (especially not Skype).

As for Nuance tech support, I had a positive experience. However, I think only the first 2 weeks are free. So sort out all your problems ASAP with them :) But they were very responsive and helpful and that’s how I figured out that I had to quit Skype.