Notes

[Scio]

So today I was sitting in class and like normal I drifted off and missed part of the lecture. Normally not a problem, this happens a lot. I usually just ask a friend for the notes, but I know no one in this class.

I want to prevent this for the future so I'm looking for a programs to run on my computer that can take speech and turn it into text. I'm on a MacBook Pro running 10.6 (pretty sure there is an update I need to grab) and I would like it to work for Pages, but something else would work too I guess. Price isn't to much of an issue, but cheaper is always better as long as the quality is there.

I've heard about the Dragon Dictate, but I was unsure if that required an external mic to work.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated

[Deleted]

Speech recognition tends to require rather specific accents and clear vocalization, and particularly rather clear audio reception. Certainly not guaranteed to have that in a lecture or classroom environment unless the lecturer in question is wearing the actual mic. The tech also usually doesn't work very well for more regular speech.

[Djinni]

I'd suggest you are better off simply making a sound recording and then making your own notes from that... You'll actually retain more of the information that way anyway.

In our lectures often the lecturers in the seminar halls wear mics so that people at the back of the room, so we just ask for the recording off them at the end of the seminar. (They don';t usually record them unless you ask though.) In regular lectures we tend to have a pile of phones and dictaphones up by the "front desk" lol.

[Howard Moon]

I'd suggest you are better off simply making a sound recording and then making your own notes from that... You'll actually retain more of the information that way anyway.

Agree with this. I took video of some lectures when I was in University, that way I'd also be able to look at the slides etc.

[DeltrusDisc]

Agree with this. I took video of some lectures when I was in University, that way I'd also be able to look at the slides etc.

^^. If you at least listen to and write the notes down at some point, then you'll be very successful, trust me on that.

[Deleted]

I'm using evernote myself on OSX 10.7. Works wonders and since it's in the cloud, you can access the notes on your smartphone or on a friends computer

[haxartus]

Definitely record the lectures. It's very easy to study this way and not to miss anything. Of course, you also need to make written notes.

[Deleted]

I used Dragon Naturally Speaking for a while. It was excellent on my laptop, but it felt rather awkward to "talk" to your computer. Anyway, it can be found here:
http://nuance.com/for-individuals/by...r-pc/index.htm

If I remember correctly, it learns your dialect by user input and after a few hours of constant use it becomes pretty potent. Basically what it does is turn speech to text, if it will pick up your teacher... I'm not so sure (unless you mount a microphone on him).

[OhpUldum]

As others have suggested I just used a sound recorder built into my phone. I have a 8GB mini SD card in my phone which is more than enough for a days worth of classes. After that when I got home I just backed up the classes to a dated folder on one of my hard drives.