speech to text to notetaking app

Posted by Gary Carson
Sep 19, 2013 at 01:54 AM

The Dragon Naturally Speaking Professional Edition has an auto-transcribe folder that does what you’re looking for, but the pro version costs a small fortune (Knowbrainer.com sells the DNS Professional full version for around $600).

If you can’t afford that, there’s only two ways I know of to transcribe your voice files and get them into a PIM of some kind. You have to either transcribe them manually or use Dragon (or some other voice-recognition program) to transcribe them, then you have to go through them, correct recognition errors and manually copy the transcripts into your PIM.

Some outliners and PIMs allow you to import files that include special markup codes which tell the program to create new entries, use certain lines as entry titles and so on. SuperNoteCard does this and it works pretty well. You can import a text file into NoteMap and it will create a new outline entry every time it encounters a new paragraph mark. The problem with these methods is that you have to dictate the codes as you’re recording your memos or notes or whatever. I’ve found that it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

At this moment, Audio Notetaker is the best application out there for managing spoken-word audio files. It won’t transcribe your files, but it makes it very easy to annotate them or transcribe them manually and you can break your files up into multiple sections by subject and so on.

I think the problem here is that most people using recorders are still thinking in terms of converting their recordings into text. Audio is a completely different medium with its own advantages and disadvantages. The solution is to start thinking in terms of audio only. Instead of reading your information, you’re LISTENING to it.

I’ve been using Audio Notetaker as a PIM. You can create multiple “notebooks” for different topics and each notebook can contain hundreds of audio files which you can then divide into manageable sections that don’t take very long to listen to. You can annotate each section, transcribe parts of each section if necessary, highlight sections, search through them very quickly using keyboard shortcuts. It’s really an incredible program.