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

Posted by Gary Carson
Apr 18, 2011 at 05:26 PM

You don’t need software to enter a timestamp. Just dictate the date and time at the beginning of each recording.

I just tried transcribing a nine-minute file from my Olympus DS5000 voice recorder (using Dragon v.10 Preferred) directly into OneNote 2007 and it worked fine despite the fact that Dragon sees OneNote as a non-standard window.

You could also transcribe your recordings into a text file and then copy the text into your PIM. Requires an additional step, though. Maybe multiple steps, depending on what you’re trying to do.

The amount of work you’ll have to do depends on how you want to organize these notes. If you’re going to dictate notes throughout the day and then create ONE note in your PIM for each day’s notes, then the work isn’t so bad. Just use one of the methods above.

On the other hand, if you want a separate PIM note for each dictated note, you’re going to have to create a new PIM note for each entry and either transcribe each dictated note separately or do a bunch of copying and pasting.

The other method is to use a PIM that lets you import text files with special formatting characters that break the text into separate PIM notes with titles, etc. All of these special formatting characters can be dictated. You would then transcribe the dictation and import it into your PIM. I don’t know if you can do this with OneNote or Whizfolders, but I’ve tried it with SuperNoteCard and it works perfectly. I dictated the content for half a dozen cards, including all the formatting characters, punctuation, etc., transcribed the file, imported it into SuperNoteCard and ended up with half a dozen properly titled cards.

I can’t remember the formatting characters SNC uses, but let’s say the pound sign (#) separates the title from the body of the card and the at-sign (@) creates a new card. The dictation would go like this:

at-sign January 12 2011 10:15 a.m. new paragraph pound-sign
I walked down to the grocery store comma robbed the place comma then rode off on my bicycle period at-sign

January 12 2011 12:30 p.m. new paragraph pound-sign

Had lunch with the President period

etc. etc.

Another method is to forget about the PIM altogether and use your voice recorder as your system of record. Just keep everything on the recorder. The major problem with this is that you can’t search the files. I have yet to find a good application for archiving and searching sound files. AudioNoteTaker probably comes the closest, but it can’t handle DSS files (which my own recorder produces) and I don’t want to go through the extra step of converting my DSS files to WAV. Also, you don’t end up with transcripts with AudioNoteTaker, just a collection of sound files with annotations.

Conclusion: there’s no really good way to deal with large collections of sound files or transcripts of sound files, but the most efficient method is probably to use a PIM that allows the importing of text files. Dictating all those formatting characters and so on sounds like a major pain, but it really isn’t all that bad once you get used to it. I guess it all boils down to whether your PIM allows importing and how complicated the formatting characters are. With Dragon, you can create spoken versions of various text strings that simplify things.

Does anybody know if you can import files into OneNote or Whizfolders?