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article - The Best Tools For Universal Note-Taking
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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 29, 2012 at 11:37 AM
Thanks for the heads up on Ema. I was actually looking for a markdown compatible android wiki :-)
Posted by JohnK
Jan 29, 2012 at 03:22 PM
Gary Carson wrote:
>but are you really going to use a laptop or whatever to take a fast note
>while standing in line at Shake Shack? Of course not. And I can’t imagine taking notes
>on a smartphone’s sub-microscopic keyboard in situations like that. It would take
>forever.
>
I would have agreed until recently. And then I discovered Swiftkey (http://www.swiftkey.net/) - a predictive virtual keyboard worthy of the name. I had been so nervous ditching my Blackberry-style hard keyboard for a virtual keyboard, but Swiftkey means I rarely type words any more. Firstly Swiftkey learns your vocabulary and style from your Gmail/texts,and within hours it is offering predictive output of astonishing accuracy—which means that writing a fairly lengthy note on a smartphone is no longer a daunting task. Swiftkey also works on tablets. It’s a rare occasion when an app/program instantly changes the way you work for the better. And I think it cost me $4.
Posted by jimspoon
Feb 2, 2012 at 09:04 AM
I’m with Gary. Nothing beats voice recorders, at least on this point - you can record more thoughts more quickly than with any other method. The trouble is finding the notes you were looking for later. To me this requires conversion of the voice recordings into searchable text.
It would be great if I could simply tell Dragon Naturally Speaking to fetch all my voice memos from my recorder and transcribe them, but no such luck. Accuracy can be problematic - but DNS Premium doesn’t even support batch transcription of voice memo files. You have to drag and drop the voice memo files one at a time into the app! Only the VERY expensive DNS Pro does batch transcription. it seems very strange given the very inexpensive options that are available with cell phones these days.
On my Android phone I can quickly dictate a voice memo (it will be included in the Evernote item as an AMR file), and with the Voice2Note service ( http://voice2note.dial2do.com/ ), this memo will be transcribed into text. The service is $3/month or $30/year, might be worth it, but I haven’t sprung for it yet. “You should also know that Voice2Note uses a combination of technology and human quality control to transcribe your notes accurately. When necessary, human transcribers will listen to your audio recording and transcribe it faithfully. They will never be given your name or other information.”
Also my little Android phone does a very good job of transcribing my speech into text - the voice recording function is included in the Android keyboard. I think the speech is uploaded to a Google server and the text is sent back to the phone? Sometimes the phone can’t connect, and I have to repeat my voice memo. Far from perfect, but quite good. I’m looking at alternatives - Nuance makes an Android keyboard called “FlexT9” - perhaps its speech recognition is better than Google’s?
But I am still using a dedicated voice recorder rather than my phone. The voice recorder quicker and easier for recording the voice, so that I can conveniently record my voice more often (without immediate transcription however).
But two more problems arise:
(1) the voice memo transcriptions should be in a form that I can easily copy / import into my outliner - preferably one time-stamped line per voice memo, so that I can paste them all at once into my outliner, which would then break the text into separate items, one for each voice memo.
(2) the words which I use to express my thoughts orally are usually not the words I want to put into my PIM / outliner - I want to massage the text.
i’ve also used NCH Express Scribe to transcribe voice memos but it’s usually just too much trouble. Sonocent Audio Notetaker is another possibility for dealing with voice memos - but at $150 it seems very overpriced.
Posted by jimspoon
Feb 2, 2012 at 09:08 AM
JohnK wrote:
>I would have agreed until recently. And then I
>discovered Swiftkey (http://www.swiftkey.net/) - a predictive virtual keyboard
>worthy of the name. I had been so nervous ditching my Blackberry-style hard keyboard
>for a virtual keyboard, but Swiftkey means I rarely type words any more. Firstly
>Swiftkey learns your vocabulary and style from your Gmail/texts,and within hours it
>is offering predictive output of astonishing accuracy—which means that writing a
>fairly lengthy note on a smartphone is no longer a daunting task. Swiftkey also works
>on tablets. It’s a rare occasion when an app/program instantly changes the way you
>work for the better. And I think it cost me $4.
Thanks John for mentioning this. I looked at the webpage. I like the Swype function on my Android keyboard. I like being able to swipe my finger across the keyboard to spell out words, rather than having to tap tap tap. Accuracy is pretty good. Can’t match the speed and ease of speech recognition though (when it works!)
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Mar 3, 2012 at 10:33 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Thanks for the heads up on Ema. I was actually looking for a markdown compatible
>android wiki :-)
For the record, Ema works from Android 2.2 onwards, like many apps I’m interested in, but my phone is stuck in 2.1.
For anyone in a similar situation looking for an alternative, I seem to have settled with the SimpleNote solution: Resoph Notes for Windows, and Mnote or Andronoter for Android 2.1 synced via the Simplenotes service. None of these is a true wiki (neither is SimpleNote itself), but Resoph Notes happily recognises [titles in square brackets] as links to notes of the same name. Very handy.