speech to text to notetaking app

>Not only images but words/phrases in sound files can be identified and
>indexed by OneNote. This can be very handy if you have recorded a
>meeting or (say) a radio interview to a sound file. All you need to do
>is save the sound file to OneNote, and it will be scanned quite rapidly
>in the background. Searches will later show the word or phrase you are
>looking for and the time into the recording when that word/phrase
>occurs.
>Audio phrases in audio recordings saved into OneNote are readily found
>via Windows Desktop Search/Index from the Windows Desktop Search bar
>(click the Start button), or via the normal Windows Explorer search, or
>via OneNote search.

Not only am I nuts about getting text from photos of books/documents, I’m also nuts about getting my voice memos into text form.  So this part of the post is also very interesting to me.  And this function of OneNote and Windows Search is entirely new to me.

I like to whip out my voice recorder and make quick voice memos.  I want a transcription of my voice memos in my favorite note manager as soon and as easily as possible.  I have good options on my Android phone.  In the Evernote app, with the “Dictate” option I can talk and watch the text appear in my note as I talk.  It works very well. I can also dictate text into any app using the speech to text button on the keyboard - i think it’s Google speech recognition using most keyboards, but Nuance (Dragon) speech recognition when using the Swype keyboard.  Not sure which is the best method - will take more experimentation.

But for me there is very much a convenience factor involved.  The more difficult it is, the more steps that involved in recording a voice memo, the less likely I am to do it.  With the Android Evernote app, or any other Evernote app - there may be several steps involved in waking up the phone, finding the app, tapping on the app, making a new note, stopping recording, etc.

That’s how a single-purpose voice recorder can be good.  Grab it, press the start button, talk, press stop button.  No looking at a display to get to that point.  Actually one of the best devices I ever had for making a quick voice note was my old T-Mobile Wing - press button, wait for beep, talk, release button, hear beep.  It’s a heavy old phone though.

I would love to have a device that I could grab like that - press and hold, beep, talk, release button, auto-upload to cloud via wifi/4g, auto-transcribe. 

Alternatively, would like the ability to make a quick recordings through the day and batch upload to cloud service for transcription later in the day.  But I haven’t found a way to to batch upload audio recordings to Google or Nuance in this manner.  So far as I know - the dictation, upload, and speech recognition have to be done in “realtime”.

But it sounds like OneNote can do at least part of this - it seems you can put your prior voice recordings into OneNote and they will be recognized and searchable.  BUT - does OneNote automatically provide a text transcription of your voice memos that you can read?  (instead of just the ability to go to a location in an audio recording that you can listen to).  That would be crucial to me.

jim

Posted by Slartibartfarst
Sep 17, 2013 at 10:00 AM

OneNote is unable to provide a text transcription of your voice memos that you can read.
I am not aware of any desktop/client application that can do that. I would certainly want to use it if there were one!

Posted by WSP
Sep 17, 2013 at 12:48 PM

My recollection (admittedly a bit hazy) is that in OneNote you can type notes and simultaneously record; then afterwards you could go to a particular place in the notes and hear the relevant part of the recording. Or something like that. I never tried out that feature, but it struck me as potentially very useful for students and journalists.

Bill

Posted by jimspoon
Sep 17, 2013 at 03:03 PM

WSP wrote:
My recollection (admittedly a bit hazy) is that in OneNote you can type
>notes and simultaneously record; then afterwards you could go to a
>particular place in the notes and hear the relevant part of the
>recording. Or something like that. I never tried out that feature, but
>it struck me as potentially very useful for students and journalists.
> >Bill
>

thanks for that reminder Bill ... http://gigaom.com/2008/09/02/coolest-technol/

This reminds me of the Livescribe Sky Wifi smartpen.  It records audio while you write, uploads the handwritten notes and audio to Evernote via wifi, and the audio is synchronized with your notes.  http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/smartpen/wifi-smartpen/

Audio Notetaker also streamlines navigation through audio - the audio is visualized as colored bars, and you can annotate it, search through the annotations.  http://www.sonocent.com/en/the_software/audio_notetaker#software-what-does-it-do 

But with these methods, in the end you’re still going back to audio.

Usually I just want to get my short voice memos into text form, so that I never have to go back to the original audio any more.

I do have a rather complicated method of doing this.  I dictate time stamps in my voice memos, copy the voice memos to my PC, merge them into one big mp3 file using mergemp3, then drop the merged file into Dragon Naturally Speaking DragonPad.  That way I end up with a stream of text with time stamps throughout.  Then I correct the text as necessary in DragonPad, and cut and paste the text into my notetaking program.  As there are a number of steps - i haven’t been keeping up with this well lately.  BUT - at least with this crazy method - making the initial voice recording is simple and automatic - and I do end up with a stream of text with timestamps.  Of course I am always looking for something better!

jim

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.

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