18 Unusual Things You Can Do With Digital Voice Recorders / Dictaphones

Digital voice recorders, used worldwide daily to record interviews and meetings. Digital dictaphones, sit proudly on many a doctor or lawyers desks to record notes an letters. But digital voice recorders can be used for other not so common recording tasks.

Over at out main blog we look at 18 alternative uses for digital voice recorders. Uses such as catching out ghosts, cheating partners, recording birds and ticking off an item from your bucket list.

Click here to head to our main blog to see all eighteen.

What Digital Voice Recorder Is Compatible With Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac

The recent update to Dragon Dictate 3 added the new transcription feature which allows recorded audio to be transcribed.

If you are working away from your Mac and have some thoughts, letters, notes or general dictation then now all you need do is pull out a compatible digital voice recorder or maybe the Nuance Dragon Voice Recorder app on your iPhone and record your spoken words.

Back at your Mac fire up Dragon Dictate 3, select the Transcription function and point to your audio file for transcription magic to happen in front of your eyes.

So what digital voice recorders are compatible with Dragon Dictate 3? What type of voice recorder do I need, notetaker or dictaphone? What should I look for in a voice recorder?

Well all these questions and more are answered on our main blog. Click here for the post:- Dragon Dictate 3, What Digital Voice Recorders Are Compatible With The New Transcription Feature

Key is the audio format that the recorder produces as it records. It needs to be either compatible with the audio formats that the transcription module in Dragon Dictate 3 can work with. Or a format which can be easily converted. We cover this also in the post.

Thinking of Voice Recognition on the Mac? Have a look at the Demo videos from Nuance

With the recent release of Dragon Dictate version 3 for Mac from the people at Nuance many are keen to try this technology. Typically held back by the "i'm not sure I would use it" little voice in your head or by a bad experience of two with Siri, voice recognition on your Mac is a whole different ball game. Why?

Well first of all it's running on your Mac. You super powerful (compared to your iOS device) computer, with plenty of ram for all that complex voice to text conversion. Powerful enough to process your spoken words on your machine instead of recording and sending your audio off to a remote server for processing which is how Siri works.

Not only that but by keeping your spoken dictation local you build on your personal voice profile, Dragon will learn from what you actually say. The more you use it the more accurate it becomes for your style of dictation and the words you commonly use.

But me telling you all this is great but you really need to see Dragon Dictate 3 in action. The lovely crowd over at Nuance have created a few "how to" and demo videos of Dragon Dictate 3 in action. I have accumulated all of them into one blog post and I describe what you are viewing in layman's terms so that you can understand exactly what you can achieve with speech recognition software on the Mac.

Click here to head to our main blog with the post showing all the Dragon Dictate 3 demo videos

Use Streaming Audio To Make Your Blog More Interesting and Accessible To Vision Impaired People

Recently I started to add streaming audio of my blog posts being read aloud on my main blog - idictate.com.au. The original intention was for vision impaired people however the side-effect was that lazy/time poor people could also benefit from having blog posts read aloud to them.

The idea originated after Olympus started to design digital voice recorders with the vision impaired people in mind. This started with using tactile keys and progressed to having a feature called "voice guidance" built into most of the digital voice recorders. Voice guidance prompt the user at every press of a button so that they are aware of what they are selecting, particularly useful to the vision impaired as the screens on digital voice recorders can be quite small and difficult to read. Olympus have gone one step further with the DM-5 digital voice recorder which also supports Daisy Consortium books and can read aloud text from a file.

To facilitate the streaming audio in my WordPress blog I use a service called Sound Cloud.

Please click here to hit to my main blog where you can see streaming audio of my posts in action.

This blog post was written using Dragon Dictate 3 from Nuance, voice recognition software for the Mac.

Olympus Pro Dictaphone Users Unable To Load Their Audio Into Dragon Dictate 3 Transcription Module

A slight issue has been found when using the Olympus professional digital Dictaphone's (DS-7000,DS-5000,DS-3500,DS-3400) with Nuance's new voice recognition software for the Mac, Dragon Dictate 3.

The problem seems to be around the conversion of the native audio format recorded on the pro dictaphones - .DS2 - when converted to a format required by the transcription module in Dragon Dictate 3.

The error when loading the file for transcription is:

The file "filename", cannot be transcribed
Dictate cannot use files with sampling rates below 22.050 kilohertz.

Olympus' own software for the Mac, DSS Player Plus version 7, only converts .DS2 audio files to 16 kHz audio files, Dragon Dictate 3 requires 22 kHz audio.

We have contacted our people at Olympus in Sydney and have advised them of what we have found. I understand the Olympus audio development team are now also aware of this issue and will be looking at a possible upgrade to the DSS player plus version 7 software in the near future.

There is a way to convert the .DS2 to audio files to 22 kHz audio and that is using the Sonority software which is supplied with the higher end digital voice and meeting recorders from Olympus (like the DS-3/DS-5/LS-3/LS-10 etc). However, this software is not easily found as an online download and we are working with the Olympus to see if this can be made freely available.

For more information please visit our main blog post on this issue - click here.

This blog post was dictated using DragonDictate three by

This blog post was dictated using the Dragon microphone For iPhone and Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac.