System for taking and organising reading notes

Posted by Hugh
Dec 5, 2011 at 09:55 AM

I too concur with Alexander and Daly about written notes. Early in my journalism days, I learnt a form of shorthand called Teeline - not as fast as Pitman’s potentially could be, but I think I reached 110 w.p.m. Later, as small recorders became available, I started to use one in interviews, but I still made Teeline notes. There’s something about the eye or ear/brain/pencil connection which helps to embed thoughts in the memory. (In addition, during political speeches that tended towards the boring, we hacks could pass jokes around written in Teeline; as far as anyone else was concerned they were merely scribbles.)

Hand-writing notes also certainly speeds up the process of understanding. Perhaps Livescribe, possibly with handwriting recognition, is a good way of retaining those processes whilst adding the benefits of the computer.

Regarding speech recognition software: my experience is that it’s an imperfect but rapidly improving technology. I have used Dragon Dictate on and off since version 5. Even with those early versions and using a voice recorder, I got recognition accuracy better than the 50 per cent reported in the Amazon review quoted earlier in this thread.

The software seems to generate very strong responses amongst some of its users, perhaps partly because of its cost; if you want to read Threads of the Dissatisfied read the Nuance/Dragon Dictate forums. Nowadays I use the Mac version. Although generally reckoned to be less good than the current Windows version, for me is the accuracy of its recognition is its best aspect - about 95 per cent at a guess, and much much better than early Dragon versions.

Where users sometimes go wrong, I think, is that they fail to use powerful enough computers with enough RAM and do not follow the software manual’s instructions precisely, and their expectations are too high: Dragon will not transcribe interviews with two voices directly (re-voicing with one voice is a way round this), nor can it cope well with significant background noise, an unusual accent, or a poor microphone/sound card set-up. And users sometimes aren’t aware how much skill is necessary to dictate successfully. Unless I am dictating no more than a couple of sentences, I always write out what I’m going to say first. In my opinion, other than for short notes or for those users such as medics and lawyers who may spend much of their working lives dictating, speech recognition software is definitely a “second-draft’ tool. Yet even having said all that, I believe that in the right circumstances it can be a great time-saver - not to mention a relief for wrists and fingers.