We have the technology!

As it turns out it is very easy to build a blogging mirror, and there are a number of different ways to do it. It is useful not just for blogging, but for anyone who has to produce a large amount of text content. Sometimes it is just easier to talk, rather that type. It leaves our brains free to think great thoughts, without having to try and remember where the ‘j’ key is, or check the that the spacebar is still working after the last cup of coffee was spilt on it. Unless you are a touch typist, you can talk faster than you can blog (see the figures in IM or E-mail? How to get your point across?).

How can you turn your speech to text? Speech recognition software. This is another one of those technologies that will become a more and more familiar part of our lives over the next decade. The major OSs already support text to speech (reading text) and speech to text (voice recognition). Both OS X and Windows (at least Windows XP on my tablet PC) have some of these features built in, even if a little hidden away in the accessibility settings. You’ll need a good quality mic, and a reasonably quiet environment.

Beyond what’s in the box.

The built in software isn’t always been the best – it can’t always keep up with full speed speech, and can take a while to train. In the case of OSX, it is for controlling menus, rather than transcription. There are more specialist applications around that out perform (and predate) bundled software. The most well known of these is Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking software. These packages give very high performance and they work in even tricky application areas, such as legal dictation.

Putting it in the cloud?

There are other routes too, for example Internet or phone network based services. You don’t need to buy anything, it lives out “in the cloud” My favouroute example is Spinvox (see “Never Loose Your Voice Again”), which allows you to call a dedicated number and then dictate a short memo. This is converted and emailed to you. It is a great way to capture thoughts, or send yourself reminders, when you are on the run. A quick phone call, utter a couple of sentences, and then relax in the knowledge that your thought is captured and waiting for you in your inbox when you get back on-line.

There are ever more options, such as commercial transcribing services. The wave of outsourcing and global connectivity has made these services more affordable by providing access to lower cost skilled labour (see what Matt Cornell did with $100 a while back). You record your speech as a wav or mp3 file, then email it  or upload it to the service. They usually email the results back to you after a few days.

Speak once, read twice.

For all of these methods, you’ll need to set apart a little time to proof read it and correct the inevitable mistakes. If you talk technobabble like me, a 100% transcription is very unlikely – I even mistype myself. Unless you are a 100% accurate typist, this is something you would have had to do anyway.

Mirror mirror on the wall…

So, there you go, a blogging mirror! Perhaps you should put one in your entrance lobby? The great thing about converting speech to text is that it can be archived, searched, sorted and annotated to anyone’s heart’s content. Combine it with any of the ways of keeping a record and you get to reap the benefits of the sort of blogging mirror I started out thinking about. You can look back on your thoughts and ideas and see how they have evolved, building on what you have learnt and marking your progress.

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In today’s hyperconnected world it is all too easy to forget what a few hours of zero distraction, zero access to external information and 100% focus are like. That and writing in volume with just a pen on paper (about 14 sides of A4 in all). My arm is still aching.

Back to business. It is all to easy to see technology as the answer to every problem around us, especially when you spend your life using it to fix problems. Last week we were working on the logo design for Redcatco (things are progressing here at a pace – more new soon). I fired up the computer to make a few changes to the proposed design. It seemed easier to edit the graphic, rather than trying to put what was in my head into words or use my poor drawing skills.

I fiddled and twiddled for ages, much to the annoyance of everyone. I just couldn’t get it looking the way I wanted. Eventually I was persuaded into using a low tech solution. I printed what I had, then got out the scissors  and glue. A few minutes later, we had what we were after to send back to the designer.

Technology is wonderful stuff, but not when it is inappropriate. Projects and tools always carry some inherent risk, and if the business return isn’t good enough to cover that, then the user looses out. It is always worth stepping back from a solution and saying “is there a simpler way to fix this?”

One simple piece of technology I am really enjoying is SpinVox. It is actually quite sophisticated, but it happens to be simple from a user perspective – as all good technology solutions are. It takes my voicemails and turns them into SMS messages and e-mail. Let’s take yesterday. At the end of the first meeting of the morning I had 11 voicemails to pick up. I read them as SMS messages on my phone, as I stood on the underground train platform waiting for a train, out of mobile coverage. It took me 1 minute and 59 seconds to read them (just for fun I’d timed myself using the stopwatch on my iPod).

I listened those same messages this morning via voicemail. It took 7 minutes and 21 seconds. For reference also I read them via e-mail, which took 1 minute and 9 seconds. The last e-mail time might not be 100% fair – I was obviously familiar with the messages by then. However, a bigger screen and less button clicks required did make it faster than by SMS. Putting aside the ten minutes I sink into my pseudo-experiment, I processed my voicemails in less than a third of the time by getting them as text. I’d argue I saved even more time than that, as I dealt with them in dead-time. Oh, and it saved me having to write the messages down, for which my aching arm is thankful. A very nice Low-Tech Hi-Tech lifehack!

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Today I can pick up a phone and call anyone I know, anywhere on the planet. Many of us have known no different all our lives. Mobile phones are so engrained into our social fabric that even those who can remember a time without them don’t. The time before them seems like a bygone era from the history books.

Over the next few years we will experience a similarly dramatic shift in the way we communicate. One aspect of that will be video (The Truly Mobile Office), the other is communications that cross modalities – Text that becomes speech, and speech that becomes text.

Spinvox delivers on a key aspect of the unified communications vision, today. It is a great productivity tool, at personal level and a business one. Its capabilities also open up lots of philosophical discussion, and there was certainly plenty of that in the session with Anne Marie, Ciaran, Ewan, Francine, James & James, Jay, Laura, Lloyd, Rob, Roger, Rachel, Sizemore, Terence, Toby and myself. An amazing set of perspectives from a diverse and insightful group, you can read more on the conversation here.

Voice was the ultimate disposable medium. Conversations are spoken and lost, aside from the occasional podcast, voicemail exchange or a video. A voice conversation is an amazingly rich form of communication, compared to something like e-mail or a blog. The tone of voice, intonation and real-time interaction engages our brain and connect us. They are the reason that the Dunbar number is so high – while apes pick nits out of each others hair to form social bonds, we chatter. Not all chatter is meant to be disposable, but to make something permanent, we had to write it down.

The technology to record every single conversation we have exists. Cheap digital audio equipment and an explosion in the size of hard drives make it affordable and possible. But what would we do with it all? Today you can’t Google your way through the world’s podcasts, you’d have to listen to them to find out if it contained what you want. Certainly you could tag every conversation recording, but all that digital editing and tagging wouldn’t leave much time for a social life. As a side note, I wonder how it would change what we do and say if every word was recorded, not just by you, but by everyone in the conversation?

Unlocking the power of the spoken word isn’t about recording it, valuable as that is. Not only can we not search those recordings, but we also loose one of the great benefits of reading: speed. We read faster that we can talk or write. Not much of a defence against the torrent of information we have to consume these days, but a useful one never the less.

We can also read in places and at moments where we couldn’t listen. Reading an SMS message in a meeting is relatively unobtrusive, compared to answering a call or listening to a voicemail – not that that seems to stop some people doing that.

Spinvox takes voice messages and makes them textual, and that is what makes it a powerful. You can create a searchable archive of text, including jotting voice notes (which are a key piece of my GTD workflow) – no excuse for loosing thoughts. You can read a voicemail message rather than having to listen to it – faster and less obtrusive. Yes, you might loose the expression of the voice – tone, pitch, volume, pauses – but you experience the spoken vocabulary still. We speak in a different way than we write, and that survives the conversion. Powerful stuff.

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