OTTER VOICE NOTES TO THE RESCUE

It’s Tuesday, February 12th, and one of the coldest, rainy days you can imagine, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover a new piece of technology, Otter Voice Notes, which will brighten up the lives of my creative friends like yourself.

Otter is a smart note-taking app that empowers you to remember, search, and share your voice conversations. Otter creates smart voice notes that combine audio, transcription, speaker identification, inline photos, and key phrases.

I am just beginning to use this application, but I am tremendously impressed. Comparing this to Dragon Naturally Speaking is like comparing a 2019 Honda Insight to a hand cranked Model T automobile. I have tried to use Dragon Naturally Speaking several times over the years and have finally given up because it was cumbersome and would not keep up with me most of the time.

The Otter AI app runs on a smartphone or on a computer and it uses an online connection for the translation to text. If you are recording and your device is not online, it will store the audio and then translate to text when the online connection is resumed. You will see that it is using artificial intelligence because it will correct the text as it prints the words out.

I use a fairly non-standard vocabulary and am impressed with the way that Otter AI handles my transcriptions. It is free for 600 minutes a month and that should handle me for a while. I host one hour webinars every week and there is valuable information in them to be transcribed for books and articles.

Here is a short transcription of a conversation I had before the start of the last webinar:

David 3:05

we continue to follow this through time and space. And I think the best thing I can do while I’m still discovering what’s going on is to help others. To keep moving.

You see, if, if, if, for instance, you’re stuck on something because your mother did something awful to you.

You’ve stopped. You’re still – your attention is still stuck back on how could mom have been so cruel or how could I have been so stupid to let her do it or what ever. See?

Instead of like, Okay, here we are, it’s 2019, the world’s going to hell and we’re going with it and let’s party! you know, anybody got a glass of wine and a cigarette and we can all sit here and swap stories – like when we used to, you know, raid the English coast and terrify the natives.

(laughter)

I knew you’d get a kick out of that Viking story.

Here are some links to explore the world of Otter AI:

A presentation about Otter at the Mobile World Congress in 2018:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ai-breakthrough-otter-ai-app-can-transcribe-your-meetings-in-real-time-for-free/

How to record calls and transcribe to text on Android:
http://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/07/tutorial/how-to-record-calls-transcribe-to-text-on-android.html

Otter offers voice transcripts on Zoom: https://otter.ai/zoom

I plan on using this last feature as soon as I can set it up. This is extremely valuable when discussing new research.

I learned about this from reading Shel Israel’s blog:

How Two Otter Encounters Inspired Me to Change My New AI Book

This entry was posted in Expanding Your Opportunities, Learning New Things, Technical Amusements, Web/Tech. Bookmark the permalink.

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