Voice To Text App For iPod?

November 4, 2015 9:14 AM

I want to make an extended interview and record it on my iPod Touch with a voice to text app. Then I'll edit the text on my Mac into a readable document. I'm running iOS 6.1.6.

I have two apps: Dragon Dictation and iVoice. The problem is they both have a buffer and must stop recording frequently to process the data into text. They seem to be designed for short messages and notes. So, as far as I know, these apps won't work for my purpose.

I've searched the App Store but there doesn't seem to be much else there. Can anyone recommend another app for the iPod? How about a work around for the apps I have? I also searched for apps for the MacBook with no luck. Any ideas?

posted by partner to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

It'd probably be safer to just record the audio of the conversation, then feed that recording into a more robust dictation program running on a computer once the interview is over.

That way, you can easily check for errors by reading over the final text while listening along to the audio from the interview. With just the data, even with a low error rate, you'll still end up with some head-scratching moments when people slightly talk over each other etc and the dictation just plain fails.
posted by Static Vagabond at 9:35 AM on November 4, 2015

Response by poster: @Static Vagabond: Here's a couple of questions. Can you recommend a dictation program for the MacBook? and, Would I feed the audio into the Mac via a cable or a mic?
posted by partner at 9:44 AM on November 4, 2015

I've only ever used Dragon Dictate-- so can only point to that, it lets you import audio files instead of recording from your mic to feed the dictation.

So you'd just record the audio in something like Voice Memo, then when you're done, share it to yourself via email, or if it's massive, connect up to iTunes and pull it out from there. You'll then have an .m4a audio file of the interview sitting on your computer, which you can feed into Dragon.
posted by Static Vagabond at 9:58 AM on November 4, 2015

Waxy had a blog post ages ago about doing transcribing using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. I've also see stuff about using Google's Text to Speech but haven't look into it much.
posted by srboisvert at 10:19 AM on November 4, 2015

Nuance is going to be putting out a new app, Dragon Anywhere, for iOS this fall. It will require a paid subscription, but, according to their promotional material, there will be no time limit for transcriptions.
posted by Bromius at 12:25 PM on November 4, 2015

I'm dictating this comment on my MacBook Pro. Offline dictation is a feature of the OS dating back to Mavericks (I'm on El Capitan now) and in my experience, it's pretty good. I haven't yet tried to use this in a room where more than one person is talking, but I expect it would work fairly well.

As others have said, you would still need to go back and do some editing to correct misheard dictation and add punctuation and the like.
posted by emelenjr at 3:22 PM on November 4, 2015

Notability app will record as you take handwritten notes
posted by prk60091 at 7:04 PM on November 4, 2015