Dragon Recorder just released by Nuance is a new app designed specifically to record your spoken voice for playback into either Dragon NaturallySpeaking (Windows – Premium & Professional edition only) or MacSpeech Scribe (Mac), known as deferred transcription. Perfect for those who need to record their thoughts, notes and letters when they are not sitting in front of their computer.

Obviously digital voice recorders currently play a big role in the spoken voice market and also a quick look on the iTunes app store you will find hundreds of voice recording apps. Makes total sense that Nuance want to move in to this space and control it on iOS devices. Their new app called Dragon Recorder is similar to just about every other voice recording app out there, it is fairly basic and very easy to use. One key feature that is missing in this and most other voice recording apps is an insert/overwrite feature. Insert and overwrite lets you, when reviewing your audio, insert more dictation within the audio file or remove chunks of dictation from within the audio file like sentences or paragraphs.

With Dragon Recorder you will need to gather your thoughts before you start recording, if you get lost or need to think some more just pause and have a think and then continue recording. This style of dictation is starting to become more common, the younger generation will adapt to this style easily but if you are old school and are use to micro or mini cassette dictaphones or even digital dictation recorders then this will be a bit of a shift for you. But hey, its free so give it a go.

Recordings can be given a filename prefix, which is handy if a few of you plan to send your audio to a central admin person to run through Dragon NaturallySpeaking under your profile, common for Professional users. WiFi sharing is via a web gui that lets you play the audio via your browser and have a listen or you can download. Audio files are recorded in .WAV audio format.

Once you have your digital audio recording on your PC or Mac simply run it into Dragon and away you go.

Just a word on MacSpeech Scribe for the Mac users. Scribe has been around for a couple of years and is a legacy product that Nuance picked up when they took over the Mac voice recognition technology from MacSpeech. The Mac side of things currently differs from Windows in that there are two separate voice recognition products – Dragon Dictate for directly spoken voice and MacSpeech Scribe for recorded voice, whereas both NaturallySpeaking Pro & Premium on Windows combines those two functions in the same software program. I still hold onto the hope that Nuance will combine this in the next major release of Dragon Dictate – makes total sense. So if you are desperate for recorded voice into your Mac for transcription then buy MacSpeech Dictate, is you are not desperate hold off as I am sure it is coming soon in Dragon Dictate.

This week I was lucky enough to attend FlyingSoloLIVE, an expo run by the FlyingSolo team held at the Australian Technology Park in Sydney. The day consisted of a number of keynote speeches by well known successful Australian business people and social media experts all aimed to educate and inspire Australian solo and small business people. The event was held as part of the New South Wales Governments Small Business Month.

For the event I decided to take along three very good but very different digital audio recorders. The Olympus WS-450s digital voice recorder, the LiveScribe Pulse SmartPen and loaded on my iPhone an app called iProRecorder. I wanted to see how each performed, which gave the best audio quality and how they lasted during a full day of recording. All my recordings were made in the Theatre Atrium at the Australian Technology Park. I took sample recordings from the back of the theatre (around 90 feet from the stage), the middle (approx. 40 feet back) and from the front row. The event had professional audio visual and the speakers had microphones.

Olympus WS-450S – This is a very new digital voice recorder launched in Australia just last month.  This is the type of digital voice recorder we sell day in/day out on our online store dictate.com.au and is a fantastic all-round performer in the digital voice world. Both Mac and Windows compatible this recorder I recommend typically for single speaker note taking, interviews and small to medium sized meetings. This is not the kind of recorder I would usually recommend for a conference type situation. For this I would generally advise the next models up (WS-550M, WS-560M or DS-55, DS-65) but I was confident that the results would be good. The device was set to SHQ recording mode and records audio in stereo .WMA audio format. The Olympus WS-450S has an RRP of AU$295 incl. GST.

The Olympus WS-450S performed very well and I was impressed, as I always am by Olympus, by the pickup quality of the audio. Staying power was no issue for the recorder and hardly made a dent in its power source which is one AAA battery. There was also no need to stress about how much audio I could squeeze onto the recorder as it has 1Gb of flash memory, even recording on the highest quality audio setting allows for 17 hours plus of recording so five or six one hour sessions were nothing.

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LiveScribe Pulse SmartPen – This is my current favourite gadget. Not only will the LiveScribe Pulse SmartPen record the audio but also allows you to hand write notes in a special note pad as you are recording audio. Your hand written notes can be viewed on your computer (Windows or Mac) and the audio can be played back from any point  just by the click of a mouse or the touch of the pen on any of your hand written words or doodles. These digital hand written notes and audio can be easily shared online. This expo, as well as lectures, conferences, meetings and interviews is exactly what the LiveScribe Pulse SmartPen is designed for so I had high expectations of this gadget. The device was set to High audio quality and the microphone sensitivity set to Automatic -  audio can be exported on a Mac in .aac format. The 2Gb LiveScribe Pulse SmartPen has an RRP of AU$329 incl. GST.

Well well … hands down the best audio recorder of the three the LiveScribe Pulse SmartPen performed brilliantly. Regardless of where I was sat in the conference hall the audio pickup was very very good. Considering that most of the time the pen was laid on the chair next to me or I was writing notes in the LiveScribe Dot Paper pad. Not only do you get amazing audio pickup but the bonus of your handwritten notes as well, so really an amazing package. Like the Olympus, no issues with staying power with hardly a dent in the battery life and with a massive 2Gb of storage I could have recorded all day without a worry. I plan to write a blog post very soon dedicated to the LiveScribe Pulse SmartPen and will include video so you can see the hand written notes in the software on a PC or Mac.

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iProRecorder iPhone App – This is the very first digital voice recorder app I loaded onto my iPhone and it has been used many times to record my notes and the occasional interview. Although iProRecorder can be used for conference/lecture recording as mentioned in the notes in the app store I was skeptical to see how the recorder would cope. The app was set to record in HQ recording mode and records in mono .WAV audio format. iProRecorder is currently AU$3.99 available from iTunes.

Although the audio quality was good the volume of the audio was very low. Using some software like Audacity or WavePad you can easily boost the volume but that adds time and complexity. Just listening to the audio through my computer was a struggle with the audio turned up. I could hear better with headphones connected listening to the audio on the iPhone. Staying power was also an issue, after a morning of recording, checking and sending email and tweeting by around 2pm (my phone was on from 6am) the battery was just about gone. I bought with me a Mophie Juice Pack Air rechargeable battery case to boost the iPhone power and that took my through to the end of the day but without my recording would have been cut short. A little disappointing, I think this app is best used in close proximity interviews and meetings and for lectures in your average sized classroom instead of an auditorium. Via its in built web server the audio can be easily accessed across Wi-Fi from any Windows or Mac computer.

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