Help Claire Move Into the 21st Century, Part 1.5: The Non-Endorsement
I’ve been receiving lots of helpful suggestions on what type of digital recorder to buy for my interviewing needs: tomorrow, we’ll have a poll on what I should end up with, and I encourage you to vote early and often because whatever ends up winning is what I’m going to go with. My life is in your hands!
In the meantime, I’ve been hearing more that it pretty much is a pipe dream to buy a recorder, upload the conversation to the computer and use a voice recognition program to transcribe it for me. It’s just not that advanced. To wit, I had the following email conversation with writer Gary Wollenhaupt:
Claire,
Transcribing an interview with a program like Dragon is a pipe dream right now because the programs have to be trained to recognize a voice by reading text that is provided and comparing your voice to the known text. One work around someone told me was to listen to the interview through headphones and then repeat the words in your voice to the software. I tried that, but it was just as tedious as typing.
Thanks, Gary.
My dad tried using Dragon once b/c he’s a horrible typist (he’s a lawyer.) He gave up on it after he dictated a memo to a “Graham” but it came out “Dear Grandma.”
I had the same experience with ViaVoice. The only sentence that came out 100% accurate was “This stupid thing does’t work” That’s no joke, my kids thought it was hysterical.
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Gary Wollenhaupt
Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our 
