Digital voice recorders

One of the basic must-have tools for any reporter is a machine you can use to record interviews and press conferences. I’ve been using a digital voice recorder from Sony for the last several years but it recently disappeared so I went on the hunt for a new one.

My ideal product would let me record in .wav or .mp3 format; time-stamp recordings in time-of-day format rather than run-time format; let me transcribe from my recording from within a word processing program like Microsoft Word; and have some sort of automatic voice-to-text capability. Oh — and it’s got to be cheap.

Let’s take a look at that wish list.

As for the voice-to-text, the dream system would let me download my recording to my PC, hit play, and some software would generate a perfect transcript of what was said. The New York Times most excellent columnist David Pogue got my hopes up recently that such a product — Dragon’s Naturally Speaking — might exist. Here’s what he said in a recent review:

“I can remember, in the early days, having to read 45 minutes' worth of [material] for the software's benefit. But each successive version of NaturallySpeaking has required less training time; in Version 8, five minutes was all it took.

And now they've topped that: NatSpeak 9 requires no training at all.”

but then, deeper in the review, Pogue goes on to say:

“NatSpeak is also available in a range of versions for the American market, including medical and legal incarnations. Mere mortals will probably want to consider either the Standard version ($100) or the Preferred version ($200), each of which comes with a headset. Both offer the same accuracy.

The Preferred edition, however, offers several shiny bells and whistles. One of them is transcription from a digital pocket voice recorder. This approach doesn't provide the same accuracy as a headset, and it requires what today is considered an excruciating amount of training reading: at least 15 minutes. But it does free you from dictating at the computer. “

Pogue doesn't say anything about transcribing several voices from a recording but I would assume, if the software needs 15 minutes to recognize your voice on a recording, it would be pretty tough to recognize other voices on a recording.

As for the timecode format, I’m still looking. When I go to a press conference, I want to hook up my digital voice-recorder to a mixing console or place it near a speaker. I want to turn it on and have it start recording using time-of-day code. That way, I can just look at my watch when I hear something interesting at 5:45 pm during a press conference, I can scribble

@17:45:44 – Harper – wants Red Deer to get an NHL franchise

As it is now, most cheap recorders only offer “runtime” timecode which means if Harper says something interesting 10 minutes into a press conference, I would have to move to “0:10:44” on the file when I review it. Recording time-of-day timecode is so much easier when you’re running around Parliament Hill making several recordings during the day.

I have not yet found one that offers a time-of-day timecode.

So, in the end, I picked up a cheap — under $100 – unit made by Olympus.  It does the basics. You can quickly and
easily move files — the default recording format is .wav – to the PC and it has a function that lets you store files on your recorder in “Date” folders. I find that handy for archiving and finding recordings.

You can also set it to start recording at a particular time of day. It does have some indexing features.

After years of computing mostly on a Mac at work, I'm now computing on Windows XP Pro. The software that comes with the Olympus is pretty bare bones and is for Windows only.

After I bought it, though, I found a great little Windows freeware utility that lets you play just about any audio file from within
Microsoft Word or other word processor. It's called Express Scribe and it's great for transcribing because I can use hot keys from within Word to start, stop, pause, slow down, speed up or rewind the recording from within Word.

Love to read your thoughts in the comments section here …