Quickly and easily convert your speech into text. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
Today, we are taking a look at a simple speech-to-text app and also a web page where you can actually do this on any of your browsers. You don't even have to install anything in order for you to convert your speech into text.
Now, I know you may be familiar with this on your mobile device, but recently I was introduced to SpeechNotes. I'll tell you a bit of the background.
One of my sons was doing a homework assignment and, very much like myself, he's not too wild about writing text. He doesn't love to write long essays or even just short book reports.
So, I thought I would find something for him that would make it that much easier so he could record something on his device. We came across SpeechNotes, and you know what? He absolutely loved it.
He spent a few minutes reciting, talking out the story or the report that he had to give. He could edit it right within the app and then quickly pasted it into a Word document, applied a little bit of editing, and boom, his homework was done.
Today, I wanted to take a look at the web version of SpeechNotes to see how it performs and to see how it might be helpful to you. Whether you're crafting emails or writing a longer report, maybe you're not wild about writing and you would like to just get your thoughts out using your voice only.
When you get to SpeechNotes.co (and yes, it is .co), you're going to come to a page like this. It gives you a little bit of instruction here on the left-hand side.
This is where you're going to see your text appear once you start recording. But a really important part is what you see here on the right.
This is some of the punctuation and some of the things that you can include. For example, if you want to add a period or a comma, I think a new line or new paragraph are very important.
Some of the other things that you'll see here I would probably go back and edit myself anyhow, but it's helpful to have this as you're recording. So how do you get started?
Well, it's pretty simple. You've got this big red record button here, which is a start/pause record option.
You will have to give SpeechNotes.co the ability to record from your system. Now, let me give you just a quick example, and I'm gonna be doing this somewhat off the top of my head, but let's say I'm replying to an email in this case.
So, let's see how it works. I'm just gonna start by hitting the record button and then I'll see how far I can get with dictating this message.
Hi Eric, comma, new paragraph, I wanted to talk to you about the meeting this coming Friday, period. Jane and I are going to need to reschedule this particular meeting, period.
It seems as though our developers are not getting as much attention as they deserve with this particular project, period. So, we need to have an emergency staff meeting this coming weekend, period.
New paragraph, we'd like to reschedule for next Wednesday and hope that you can make that date, period. Please reply and let us know if that's a possibility for you and your staff, period.
New paragraph, looking forward to hearing your reply by the end of the day, period. Okay, I've hit the pause button, so it's gonna stop recording and transcribing my text here.
So, I'm just doing a quick review because I actually wasn't looking at the text that often as I was recording. I was trying to think of the message, and of course, this is just a fictional conversation that I'm having here.
I did feel a little weird because I knew it was gonna be transcribing immediately what I was saying. It doesn't really give you that option to, you know, sort of go back.
I could hit the pause button and go back, and of course, I can go back and edit anything at this point. But as you can see, it actually did a pretty good job of transcribing word-for-word what I was saying.
Even when it came to the new paragraph option or adding a comma like I did at the very beginning, it did a pretty good job of doing that as well. Now, you might be thinking, is this a little pointless?
Why would I be crafting an email here and then I'd have to copy and paste this into my message? Now, they do give you a fairly large icon here, so if I hit copy to clipboard, now it's copied to my clipboard.
I can go and paste this anywhere that I want. But remember, you could use a service such as SpeechNotes for anything.
It doesn't have to just be an email. You could be writing a report or an introduction, an executive summary, or something of that matter, and then paste it into that document.
So, this is obviously not the only option available to you. I do like to review something that is a little browser-specific.
This isn't specific to Mac or PC or to a particular device, although you may want to check out the SpeechNotes app if you'd like to make use of this on your mobile app as well. So, I'd love to hear from you next.
What do you think of this type of software? Do you have a recommendation of other speech-to-text applications or services out there?
How do you use them? Do you use them for email replies? Do you use them for writing a report?
Are you like me, and you really don't like typing out? You don't like the act of writing, so you'd rather just talk about it? I'd love to hear from you next.
As always, thank you so much for watching today's video. Be sure to subscribe, give this video a like, and leave me a comment down below.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
