Real-time iOS transcription app, a great help for writers, students, executives
I am a good, fast typist which is essential to my job as a journalist and writer. It’s faster to type than write on notepads. Thankfully, my typing speed is good enough to capture the conversation almost in verbatim.
On occasions where I have to do stand-up interviews, I record the discussion on the digital recorder, and then later transcribe my notes to text. It’s so troublesome.
With Otter, I have finally found an easier and more efficient way to take notes.
Otter is an AI-powered transcriber. It is a free service that transcribes speech on the go using AI. It is designed to be able to understand and capture conversations like interviews, meetings and lectures. It can also capture multiple voices.
Otter was introduced to me by my friend Edward during the Nvidia conference in the US a couple of months ago. I saw Otter at work on his phone. As the speaker spoke, the words were transcribed into text in real time. Immediately, I downloaded the app and put it into action. I was amazed by the real time transcription. Since then I have been using the app.
I found it most useful during standup interviews or when the interviewee is seated surrounded by journalists. Activate the app and put it near the interviewee. You can hear the conversation, ask questions and Otter will capture everything.
A key advantage is that all the captured notes are automatically tagged and searchable, a great feature for journalists because we do many, many interviews.
Most significant is the time saving. From experience, I know that for every hour of recorded conversation, it will take between two to three hours to transcribe to text. It is rolling the recording forward and back to listen to the conversation and type the notes to ensure 100 per cent accuracy.
Otter also allows the notes to be shared. I send it to my email so that it is stored under my interview notes. Or you can send the notes to others. Else the notes stay on your phone.
Otter is not flawless. It doesn’t catch every word, it misses exact words at times, for example, “helps,” instead of help. Names especially when they are Asian names, they are not accurately transcribed. That said, accuracy is about 80 per cent which isn’t bad. I can live with this. After all, I would still go through my notes after the interview to correct typos and add comments to remind me of the key issues raised.
There are 3 things to look out for when using Otter:
1.Ensure that the phone is hooked up to wifi to ensure it is connected to its AI server and thus activate the real-time transcription. Once I forgot to do this. The app recorded the discussion but it took about three days before the transcription showed up on the phone. On another occasion, it did not record or transcribe at all.
2.Ensure that the interviewee speaks loudly and clearly. Mumblings are not captured too well.
3. As a good practice, I would continue to type my notes during an interview. After all, the phone may run out of battery or for some reason the app fail to work.
On a media tour to visit various AI facilities in Canada, I found a Japanese journalist using Otter. He types his notes in English. He found Otter indispensable and was profuse in his recommendation.
Media reports that Otter was developed by Sam Liang, the former Google architect who put the blue dot on Google Maps. He had assembled an A-list team to work on this app.
Said a Techcrunch report earlier this year: “Along with a team that hails from Google, Facebook, Nuance, Yahoo, as well as Stanford, Duke, MIT and Cambridge, Liang’s new company AISense has been developing the technology underpinning Otter over the past two years.”
Otter (https://otter.ai/login) makes life easy for me. Better get it when it is still free for iOS, Android and the Web.
This is the first of a new weekly column on the Apple ecosystem.
