Academic Productivity » Speech to Text: timesaver or time waster?

 

Could Microsoft One Note & a speech PowerToys be the ultimate idea capture tool?

Some advantages of Audio from the Academic Productivity blog...

1. The first advantage is that audio forces linearity on you.
2. The second advantage is that dictating also prevents multi-tasking; that is, when you are doing your audio recording, you cannot be working on all things at the same time.
3. The third advantage of audio is that it removes a barrier of entry for developing an idea.
4. A fourth advantage of dictating is that it is actually hands-free; so you could do something, -again, only if you really have to multi-task while you are dictating-.

Academic Productivity » Speech to Text: timesaver or time waster?

Start with Audacity.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Hit MS for the SDKs or grab Dragon Dictate.

http://www.microsoft.com/speech

Dig up a speech to text OneNote powertoy.

http://www.mperfect.net/oneNoteToys/

And see what happens...

More info here.

http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2006/03/16/audio-transcriptions-and-annotations-with-onenote.aspx

Microsoft Sql Server 2008 & its ability to work with unstructured data may shine with audio and video-based applications.

There are plenty of applications for speech recognition as both an idea capture tool, and a transcription tool for things like voice mail (Skype's doing it now) & accessibility.  If you don't feel too strange about talking to yourself, that is...

Of course, it's probably more fun to make Holograms in One Note...