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#transcribe

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Evernote has gotten seriously better

Almost doubling the subscription price of a program is usually not a recipe for customer satisfaction, but I can now make an exception for Evernote. Yes, the note-taking app that many people seemed ready to leave for dead three and a half years ago, when a European software company I had never heard of bought the app that I’d already been relying on for more than a dozen years.

The Nov. 16, 2022 TechCrunch headline on Kyle Wiggers’ post about Bending Spoons buying Evernote practically sighed, calling it “the end of an era.” By then, Evernote had fallen greatly from its heights a decade earlier, when it was a frequent home-screen occupant of iPhones in Silicon Valley and visionary CEO Phil Libin talked about making the company a “100-year startup.”

After Evernote’s introduction in 2014 of a business-card-scanning feature that I still rely on, I had not seen many new features useful to my own work. And I was still experiencing too many note-synchronization glitches between my devices, despite the vow of new management to focus on the app’s core note-taking functions.

All this had me wondering if the premium account that had been a fixture in my Web-services budget since 2015, and which had increased from $45 a year to $69.99, was an expense I would be better off zeroing out. The obvious alternative was Microsoft’s OneNote, which I was already paying for with my Office 365 subscription.

But some genius at Microsoft elected to retire the company’s Evernote-to-OneNote importer in September of 2022, making any such migration a lot more difficult. And then the new management at Bending Spoons got to work improving the product–and one of the first things the people at that Milan-based firm addressed was note sync.

They made enough progress that when the company announced a steep rate hike at the end of 2023–from $69.99 to $129.99–I grudgingly decided to re-up for one more year and see where things stood. Eight months later, I was pleasantly surprised to see words I typed in my laptop’s copy of Evernote appearing my phone’s copy of the app a second later.

Today, that lag is barely discernible.

And last year, Evernote added a feature that directly helps one of my core tasks as a journalist, writing down what people say. This AI Transcribe tool that once served up long, unbroken blocks of text has gotten increasingly accurate and useful.

When I tested this Saturday afternoon by having the Evernote app on my iPad record and then transcribe a video of a 15-minute talk from the HumanX AI conference, the transcript that it generated in 40 seconds was just about as accurate as the Read AI transcript on the conference’s site (aside from botching a company name) and added bullet points and numbers to match the speaker’s pacing.

Evernote’s new management has also done a good job of communicating with its customers, posting detailed release notes for the app’s Windows, Mac, Android and iOS/iPadOS versions (why is that so hard for other companies?) to go with its frequent updates. The app still needs a word-count function, but overall it seems immensely improved from two years ago.

Meanwhile, Evernote’s cross-platform competition hasn’t done as much to earn my business.

OneNote still doesn’t have a built-in business-card-scanning feature–that requires a separate app–and sees fewer updates than Evernote, with less detail published about the content of these updates. I don’t see the same hustle at Microsoft.

And I just don’t want to trust this function to Google Keep, the free app Google had the temerity to announce in 2013 literally a week after the company killed off its beloved RSS client Google Reader. Twelve years later, a lot more of my digital life now happens on Google services, which makes me even less interested in handing over this extra bit of it to that company.

Yes, $129.99 is a serious amount of money for a Web app and service–but not in the context of one that I use and find useful multiple times a day.

This one is for the #musicians, Andy Robinson's #Transcribe is an audio workstation specifically for transcribing music recordings, built for Mac, Linux, and that other OS (fenestra? porthole? jalousie?).

I bought my lifetime subscription a very long time ago, several computers ago, and I'm still amazed every time I get Andy's emails and sure enough, my license is still good after all these years.

Here are some extracts from Transcribe! reviews and emails from users:

seventhstring.com/xscribe/revi

www.seventhstring.comSome extracts from Transcribe! reviews and emails from users

Practicing #transcription today, I'm using an audio of a #speech given by Hilliary Clinton at a world conference for women. Beautiful speeches like this one use more complex sentences, delivered slowly and clearly. I'm sure Hillary Clinton didn't write all her speeches, but she is a brain trust and an amazing speaker. And what a beautiful thing to take down these words. Imagine trying to #transcribe the speeches of the MAGA OG.

Some #FavoriteTools

#perplexity.ai for thoughtful web queries. (Shows reasoning and references.)

#Vim for #TextEditing

#Firefox w/ #Tridactyl #uBlockOrigin

#Raindrop for #Tagging and #Bookmarking web pages

#Inoreader #RSS reader

#Pandoc for document creation/conversion

#Ubuntu #Linux (even if it's running under Windows #wsl

#Python w/ #Jupyter #Pandas #Matplotlib #numpy #scipy #plac

#TheBrain for #KnowledgeManagement (but considering moving to #Obsidian)

#MoonReader for ebooks and PDFs

#RolandFP90 and A-88 for #piano

#transcribe for working through #music #video

#Leatherman #SkeletoolCX for EDC multitool

#Benchmade #Griptilian when I need more of an actual knife

#Signal for #messaging

#mastodon for social media

#antennapod for podcasts

#streamlightwedgext for #EDC flashlight

Replied in thread

@wwsiv ich hab mal AWS transcribe ausprobiert und das hat vor 12 monaten mittelgut funktioniert. Vielleicht ist es mittlerweile besser. Es gibt aber eine Sprechererkennung.

aws.amazon.com/de/transcribe/

Ein bekannter meinte: bei YouTube hochladen und dort transkripieren lassen...habe ich aber selbst nicht getestet. support.google.com/youtube/ans

Amazon Web Services, Inc.Amazon Transcribe – Sprache-zu-Text – AWSAmazon Transcribe ist ein automatischer Spracherkennungsservice (ASR), der es Entwicklern leicht macht, ihren Anwendungen Sprach- und Textfunktionen hinzuzufügen

Do any devs out there know if you can tell the #OpenAI #whisper #transcribe system to use British English spelling in transcriptions? I see "--language en" is an option (and the one I use). There is a "uk", but that's Ukrainian...

The reason I ask is to prevent misspellings of common terms like "color/colour", "favorite/favourite", etc...