What if you could walk the walk AND talk the talk
Today’s topic is dictation. In fact, this transmission was dictated. Obviously a content creator could really benefit from accurate dictation software. Wallking around, being outside, really jars ideas loose, most people can talk faster than they write or type. Steaders being who they are we putter a lot outside pulling weeds, checking fruit, or just enjoying air or the grass, so dictation software that works would be great. We tried three different options. Here is our take. (We are not getting paid for any of this.) If you are aware of a different one, drop a line.
Google voice to text
First there’s a bunch of dictation apps that use Google’s voice to text backbone. They are good enough for texting. But not good for anything else. They're better—sometimes--than whacking tiny numbers was your big old thumbs, that's about it.
Our two main contenders were Dragon Naturally Speaking’s mobile app called Dragon Anywhere and otter.ai.
Dragon Anywhere
Let's start with the best the pure dictation app and also the most disappointing: Dragon Anywhere.
Its almost good enough to use. It's so good that you think you want to rely on it but it's not good enough to actually rely on. It's in the uncanny valley of dictation software. It's $15 a month and we don't approve of ongoing payment instead of ownership, subscription services are mostly foul, but we might use it anyway if it fully did the job.
It has two deficit that make it unusable But before we talk about those let's say that this is head and shoulders the most accurate transcription that you're going to see. So why are we saying it's unusable? Well, two reasons. First it's incredibly sensitive to background noise. You can't use it while driving which is one of the major places where you would want to use mobile dictation software for content creation. If you just happen to be outside well and good unless a car drives by there or there’s some noise in the background. Which brings us to the other major problem. It's really good but it's not perfect. And there is no recording of your voice as you dictate so you can't go back later to check and find out what you really meant to say when the transcription goes bad. Whatever you originally said is just gone and you have to remember it . Compounding the problem Dragon requires an active connection. If there's lag or you lose transmission for a second or two it simply stops recording. If you are just outside working on something, talking into a headset or a microphone, you’ll never know it until you go back and look at the transcript you'll see just content missing, gone, and there’s no recording. The app assumes that you are sitting there staring at your screen actively engaged in editing as you go along, as if you were writing a memo in your office. Dragon doesn’t like flow.
It's not really clear to me who the customer for Dragon Anywhere is. You have to pay attention, you have to be looking at the phone, you can't just talk, which means it's . . . someone inside in an office? I would think that for most people the Dragon software that's already there for the PC would be just fine if that's the setting they are in. It almost seems like the mobile app is designed for that very rare subset of people who want to dictate in their office, maybe because their hands hurt, but who like pacing back and forth a bit while they do it. It's not freeform. You can’t just talk. I think the Dragon software family really was meant for something like dictating office memos where you don't need that flow of thought, and its pretty good for that purpose. But why they would have a phone version? I have no idea.
A minor Dragon problem is it doesn't have a desktop counterpart so if you want to take your transcription and do something with it you have to email it to yourself or edit it on the phone. It's inconvenient and realistically unnecessary. We mentioned the active connection requirement earlier--in my opinion that's probably unnecessary too. If you still may want to try Dragon Anywhere there's a free seven day trial. There's a a lot of old complaints in the reviews that the trial is a scam and it won't terminate but I didn't have any problems with it. I used it for seven days and then cancelled.
Otter.ai
Alright, let's talk about otter.ai. It is not as good in the voice to text conversion. It's not really close. It also doesn't let you punctuate and it adds punctuation for you, which is annoying because it's not very accurate. Any pause for thought , bam, a period.
So otter AI is not as good. It's not even really meant for dictation. It's meant to be a way of making notes about meetings, transcribing the various speakers voices—who knows, probably hoping for a big NSA payday some day—but there is a free version and you can basically use it for voice to speech dictation. Have a one person meeting, it will do the conversion.
So here's what makes up for otter.ai not being very accurate. First and probably most important, it has a recording that records your voice as you dictate. So when you sit down to convert the transcription into actual content, you can just jump through the transcript, click on a part that's unclear, and it will start playing what you said at that point. It makes it very easy to correct. I wish there were less to correct. I’m not exactly happy with otter.ai because accurate transcription is important. But being able to check what you dictated is essential and otter.ai wins in that aspect.
The other thing I like about it it does have a desktop option so you don't have to do your polishing, your touching up the transcript, on your phone, you don't have to find some workaround like emailing it to yourself, you can just open up the desktop version in a browser and work on the transcript right there.
Obviously the ideal thing would be some kind of combination of otter.ai and Dragon Anywhere, the recording feature of otter.ai , the ability to use it on the desktop platform of otter.ai, and the much higher quality transcription of Dragon Anywhere, but for now I'm an otter.ai user. It's what I used to create this post talking into a phone while driving. And although it takes more effort to clean it up afterwards I still think it's less time than if I had just made a note or two and then sat down to type it up.
What Next
One option I might try in the future is getting the dragon desktop software which is more trainable and recording my voice on the phone and then playing it into the software to see how that works. The disadvantage would be that the recording isn't automatically synced up with the transcription. So I would have to if there was a part of the transcription missing or wrong I would have to guess where it was in the recording and jump around in order to hear it. I suppose I could always use otter.ai for the recording, and then play it into the desktop Dragon. Whee! I haven't done that yet though because the desktop Dragons are pretty pricey. And I'm looking for a free trial period offer before I give it a shot.
If it does work the Dragon software is good enough in its quality that I would be willing to pay the full price for it but I would want to try it first.
Robustness wins over Accuracy
Bottom line: Dragon Anywhere is fairly precise but fragile and otter.ai is rough but robust. Rough but robust wins.