Office meetings haven’t improved much in the last, what… 25 years? PowerPoint presentations and notebooks are still commonplace. If this sounds like your daily work life, know that it is possible to work better, and work less, by using the right application. Here are four.
Google recorder
Google Recorder is probably the best thing to do if you’re attending a lecture or presentation and need to take notes. The app is a recorder first and foremost, but it excels at professional events that you have to attend from time to time when you work in an office.
The app records conversations and automatically saves a copy to cloud servers. It’s convenient to view them later on another device, no matter which one. In addition to recording, Google Recorder does automatic, live transcription of what it hears. It can recognize and distinguish between different speakers, to separate the text accordingly. It also revises itself in the background to add punctuation and line breaks where appropriate.
The result is that you no longer really need to take handwritten notes, since everything is done on the screen of your phone… which must be a Pixel phone, since Google reserves its app for its own phones. But at least the service is free. In fact, it turns out to be a great selling point for Pixel phones, since this recorder works very well, both in French and in English or in another language.
Otter AI
Very few people own a Pixel phone. They will probably want to find an app equivalent to Google’s recorder that works on any other Android device or an iPhone. That’s good, it exists. The best known of the lot is probably that of Otter AI. Its eponymous application is free to download. It allows you to record and then transcribe up to 300 minutes of conversation for free. It can distinguish voices and it can also add punctuation automatically, but its efficiency is a little lower than its rival from Google.
Once the recording is finished, the application can summarize it, highlighting the highlights. It is with astonishment that we realize that this report is generally very reliable.
Otter AI offers a more generous version of its application to its subscribers, for around a dozen dollars per month. The app is surprisingly useful. It is already used by dozens of business people, journalists and communications professionals around the world. Its only flaw is that it only manages to transcribe conversations in English. Its creators are well aware of this limitation, but we are still waiting for its multilingual counterpart, or at least capable of correctly interpreting French.
tl; dv
The good news for people who want to automate note-taking other than in English is that there is a solution. Her name is tl; dv. This is the contraction of “Too Long; Didn’t View” (too long, I didn’t watch). Basically, this application allows you to record the sound and image of video calls on Google Meet, Teams, Zoom and a few other platforms that have become common over the last four years. It also offers a transcription of the conversation that took place there. It does this in any of the 25 programmed languages, including French, and much better than the default transcription option included in these platforms. It can even translate its transcriptions into another of these same languages, in a few seconds.
If we had to give just one example of the benefits of artificial intelligence at work, it would be this application that we would point to. And, no, it doesn’t really threaten anyone’s job… On the contrary, it frees the mind. Because she does it quite well.
Use tl; dv costs nothing. A more advanced version of the service is offered from $27 per month. Its only drawback is that it does not offer an independent mobile application, since it is software that integrates with video calling platforms. You can still use it to record and transcribe in-person meetings, but it’s a little less fluid than using a native mobile app.
Nebo
If you find it unthinkable to let the machine do the note-taking for you, know that we understand you. Handwriting is an excellent way to put your thoughts in order and organize your thoughts on what you have learned in advance. That said, writing by hand, then transcribing everything on the keyboard of a personal computer, that is perhaps a step too far. Especially since there are increasingly effective ways to do it for you. The Nebo app is proof of this.
For some time now, owners of an iPad and an Apple Pencil have been able to see the words they jot down on their tablet’s screen be transposed into digital text and automatically inserted into a note, text document or email . Nebo is a bit of the same thing, but for both Apple devices and Android devices. And on the Android side, it’s not just tablets that are sold with a stylus. There are (large) phones, and even e-readers that do this.
Nebo is a free application that allows you to simply take notes, or even annotate PDF documents, in the language of your choice. A more efficient version costs $12, but basically, it does a good job… even if you write a little crookedly with your left paw, as Grandma used to say back in the day.
Except that, back in the day, there was no AI to do the job for us!