New Olympus Voice Product Distributor for Australia & New Zealand

This week Olympus Imaging took over the distribution of all Olympus voice products from Nationwide Dictating. Nationwide had been the sole distributor for the last sixteen years and had supported the voice community from their head office in Melbourne and small offices in Sydney and Brisbane.

Olympus Imaging have already started adding the voice products to their website - www.olympus.com.au and we will be seeing some new digital voice recorders in Australia soon, namely the amazing DM-450 and DM-550 recorders which have taken over from the now discontinued DS-55 and DS-65 models.

Also of note is the reduction in RRP for most of the recorders in the digital voice range. More details on this from at our main blog site: http://idictate.com.au

What recorder shall I take to the conference? - Olympus WS-450S, LiveScribe Pulse Smartpen or iProRecorder iPhone app

I was fortunate enough to attend FlyingSoloLive at the Australian Technology Park in Sydney this week where I met and listened to some great Australian business people.

The day was made up of mainly keynote presentations listening the experiences of Australian business people, their thoughts and their advice.

I decided to take along three recording devices to see how they would cope with a day of recording and how good the audio quality really was. The devices were:

• Olympus WS-450S digital voice recorder
• LiveScribe Pulse SmartPen
• iProRecorder - Voice recorder app for the iPhone

For the full review of how these performed with sample audio from each head to our main blog site: idictate.com.au

MacSpeech Dictate International Announced - Support for French, Italian and German Speakers

Annouced out of the MacSpeech head office in the US today is a new Mac only voice recognition product called MacSpeech Dictate International. This adds to MacSpeech's current range of only English speaking (with various accents like Australian) speech recognition software and now adds support for French, Italian and German speakers.

More on our main blog site: http://idictate.com.au

Philips Dragon NaturallySpeaking DVR Digital Voice Recorder Edition

New from Philips and Nuance is the Dragon NaturallySpeaking Digital Voice Recorder Edition, a bundle containing a cut down version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 10 and a Philips Digital Voice Tracer 660 digital voice recorder.

The is a very cheap entry into the voice recognition world and well worth a look, especially if you are someone who is used to recording dictation into a voice recorder for a secretary or transcriptionist to transcribe.

The Dragon software, although using the latest speech recognition technology on the Dragon voice recognition engine, is a cut down version in terms of features when compared to the basic Standard Edition or the more advanced Preferred Edition. Both of which come with a headset and mic and allow you to dictate directly to your PC. With the Voice Recorder Edition only dictation recorded on a digital voice recorder can be transcribed.

For the full review of Dragon NaturallySpeaking DVR Edition please visit our main blog site: http://idictate.com.au

New WS Series Digital Note Takers for Australia Announced by Olympus Voice

Another change in the digital voice recorder range from Olympus Voice Australia is soon to be upon us. In a total revamp of their WS Series range of small, high quality digital note takers the old range is about to be discontinued and replaced with three new recorders. The recorders being, or have been already, discontinued are the:

WS-210S, WS-311M, WS-321M & WS-331M

These recorders which are very popular and used for a range of audio recording from single speaker note taking, interviews, small meetings and focus groups and conference and lecture recording will be replaced by:

WS-450S, WS-550M & WS-560M

The 'S' stands for Stereo, as in stereo recording and the 'M' stand for Music playback and stereo recording. The new models look similar to and operate in the same way as their predecessors with the big chances in these units coming with the memory increases (1Gb, 2Gb and 4Gb respectively) and the addition of a restractable USB connector.

No official release date as yet but they are expected before the end of August 09 in Australia. Also no indication of pricing as I write this blog post.

For a full round up of the new recorders please head to our main blog site: idictate.com.au

Review of the Olympus WS-210S Digital Voice Recorder

The little WS-210S digital voice recorder from Olympus Australia is our top selling digital voice recorder. Used by all kinds of people from students recording lectures, market researchers recording focus groups, journalists recording sound bites and interviews through to amateur family historians recording their relatives voices and stories to keep for generations, the WS-210S is a true all round voice recorder.

Head over to our main blog site for a full review on this digital voice recorder: iDictate Blog

More Recorders Discontinued By Olympus Australia - WS-311M & WS-321M

In another surpise from Olympus Voice Australia, keeping the tradition of not telling anyone that its coming, they discontinued two more voice recorder models yesterday (10th July, 2009), they were the popular WS-311M digital notetaker and the next one up in the range the WS-321M. Both recorders were exactly the same in function and ability, the only difference came with their memory 512Mb for the WS-311M and 1Gb for the WS-321M and their colour. This now leaves just the WS-331M, with its massive 2Gb of memory from the original line up of three recorders.

When you think about it makes sense to drop these two. The WS-311M was very very close in spec and size to the WS-210S recorder, the WS-210S was quite a bit cheaper so maybe a pricing decision casued the WS-311Ms demise. Also the WS-321M, this was really an unneccary recorder, most people either went for the WS-311M or if they needed more memory would jump to the WS-331M so this recorder never really sold well.

In the WS series this now only leaves the WS-110 mono digital voice recorder (great for single speaker and one-on-one interviews), WS-210S stereo digital notetake (interviews, larger meetings, conferences and lectures) and the WS-331M (same as WS-321M but with added class in the piano black).