RECORDING/ TRANSCRIBING INTERVIEWS

The Livescribe is pretty cool: ties audio recording to notes on the page, so you can jot down the key stuff, and when you point the pen at that point it cues up the audio recorded at the time. Being able to tag/bookmark key stuff is ace, no need to scan through the whole recording to find the bit you want.

IRISNotes takes a different approach, and digitises your handwriting, so if you're neat enough it can convert straight to text. That said, if you're neat enough you can just scan handwritten notes and OCR them just as well.

Dragon is probably the best voice recognition package going (but comes at a price). I know a lot of people swear by it (for disability access as well as it makes writing easier if you suck at typing). You have to train it a little for best results, but as far as I know you can have multiple profiles set up. I don't know if that means two of you could dictate at once.

A lot of people just take notes on a laptop these days.

What will work best for you depends on how you work best.

Nope, see if you can find a bricks-and-mortar shop that stocks them and have a try? Or Google for an accessible tech (for disabilities) company near you, they'll often have a show room for trying stuff out, seeing what suits your needs. Note-taking aids are high on the list of reasonable adjustment for school/work.

I use a Sony digital recorder (Model ICD-PX720). It's about $60 and comes with software and a USB link to a computer. There's also a driver online for transcribing voice to text via Dragon Naturally Speaking (which I also use).

Dragon's arguably the best software around for voice to text recognition, but WinXP and onward has built-in voice to text recognition (though I haven't tried it out yet since I use Dragon). Dragon 12 Basic runs about $60 at Walmart, but immediately updates to 12.5 as soon as it loads.

Dragon is sensitive to the voice profile of the user so yes, you can only use it with one user per voice profile. You can, however, set several different voice profiles and switch between them when necessary (it does take a while to switch profiles though - about a minute or so in my experience). Dragon 12.5 is roughly 80% accurate out of the box, but increases in accuracy as it learns.

Recording transcriptions runs about 80-85% accurate.

My Sony digital acts just like a standard hand-held tape recorder like the ones that use 90-minute mini-cassette tapes. I highly recommend it. There's a $40 version too, but it doesn't come with the software CD or USB cable.

I also have a Pulse Smart Pen which requires dot paper to transcribe your handwriting. It's excellent in that aspect. For about $30 you can also download a program called MyScript which will convert your handwriting to text and is about 80% accurate.

Hope this helps.