Notetaking: Caption.Ed and Glean

I find Otter.ai very useful in the same space.

I’m afraid that I am not familiar with these particular apps, tho’ I’m certainly familiar with the problem.

Depending upon your needs – especially if you anticipate any future use of the notes – I recommend going with whatever seems to be the more established company. You don’t want your material to be ‘orphaned’ a few years from now.

I used to do a lot of interviews and for a long while, my go-to was LiveScribe, which had a special recording pen that you used with specially printed proprietary notebooks. They are still around, and it’s still a cool technology and is probably more developed now. Not full captioning, but the sound is coordinated with your notes, so that you can later tap a note and hear the related audio. You can convert your handwriting to typed text.

I dropped LiveScribe when I started to use Microsoft OneNote, which has a similar capability and was good enough for my purposes.

For straight transcription of a recorded interview, I used Rev.com3, which is still around. Upload a sound file, get a transcript back. Excellent quality, fast turnaround, and not expensive.

I also used Recordiapro for transcribing phone interviews. Easy, good quality.

One caution on all this sort of thing: Be sure to verify legality. I live in a two-party state, so I have to capture the other party’s assent to being recorded.

I’m sure there are other technologies available now and will be interested to hear what some options might be.

And – as an aside – given the availability of this tech, one of my pet peeves is that it is not used more often. I get very worked up over broadcast news where the captioning severely lags on interviews that were obviously edited before airing. I’m amazed that’s allowed under the ADA.

Hi Bob, Access to work recommended Caption Ed for me too. Tried the trial version in meetings (you can download as an app too so no install on wk kit…) and really liked it. Proper version on its way. I found it dramatically more accurate than the transcript on MS teams.

I use Caption.ed and love it, it’s changed my life to be honest.

Had tried some of the others, including Glean which I thought was terrible. Could recommend Caption.ed enough though.