Tip of the Day — Use Note2Self and MacSpeech Dictate To Record and Transcribe On The Run

I tend to do a lot of my writing using voice recognition software. When I used Windows Dragon NaturallySpeaking was my software of choice. It is amazingly accurate and fast. (The last version that I used was version 9.5 and word is that the new version 10 is even faster and more accurate.)

When I made the jump over to Mac the only real choice was iListen. On the whole it was okay, but it definitely wasn’t up to the level of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. This past spring MacSpeech replaced iListen with MacSpeech Dictate- an entirely new software package that licensed the speech recognition engine used by Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The new software remains far behind Dragon NaturallySpeaking in terms of flexibility and capabilities, (for instance Dragon does a far better job of using voice commands to edit text and has more options for input devices such as using a Windows mobile handheld), but for basic voice recognition Dictate works quite well — especially when you use a high quality, noise canceling microphone. (In fact his entire post is being dictated using MacSpeech Dictate.)  As a result, I use MacSpeech Dictate very often and find it to be quite good for basic text input.

The Holy Grail of speech recognition, however, is to be able to be on the road and use my handheld as a speech transcription device.

I have been able to achieve a certain degree of this through Jott and reQall. Unfortunately, as I’ve noted before, Jott only provides 15 seconds of recording time and reQall offers 30 seconds.  They are useful  for short snippets of text but if I have a great deal of text that I want to record and have transcribed they are not the most convenient way to achieve my end.

Unfortunately, MacSpeech Dictate 1.0 does not support voice recorder transcription. That will, hopefully, be coming at a later date but for now it is not an option. I got to thinking this morning, "What would happen if I recorded something on the road, e-mailed it to myself and then, when I got home, played it through my Mac’s speakers into my noise canceling microphone while MacSpeech Dictate was running?"

So that’s exactly what I did. I used Note2Self to record a voice note and send it immediately to my email account. (Note2Self makes this a simple process.) I then held the headset microphone to my speaker, started Dictate and played the recording. After a few runs I learned the right pace at which to speak and how to silently count to five before starting to speak so that everything was up and running at the same time.

How did it work? See for yourself. The following is the text that was created from a voice note sent to my e-mail account by Note2Self. I have not changed the text other than to underline the one mistake.

I am sitting at my desk holding my iPhone. I’m recording this speaking slowly and accurately, however I am not speaking at an uncomfortable pace. Hopefully, I will be able to send this to myself, play it out of my computer speakers, and have it automatically transcribed by MacSpeech Dictate.

This is an attempt and hopefully it will succeed while. This is the end of this test.

As you can see there’s only one error in the text. In other words, by using a Note2Self and my iPhone I have an easy way to record voice notes and have them transcribed in a few easy steps.

Something tells me that this is a little trick that I’ll be getting a great deal of use from.