I bought myself a new dictation rig, like actual physical hardware, this week. The Plaud Note Pin.
I will give it a separate review once I've used it for a week or so, but I’m pretty excited by it. Having dropped some bucks on it, however, I was immediately struck by buyer's remorse. Couldn't I just do something like this with my Apple Watch and the Voice Memo app? After all, one of the new features of the app is transcriptions for your notes.
Maybe I didn't need to spend a couple of hundred bucks buying dedicated hardware. I could just take a voice memo and have Siri transcribe it.*
Yeah, nah, not too much. I wanted to make a quick note to myself about a chapter I'm currently writing in The Bjorn Identity. It's an action-driven sequence on a train during which I decided my characters would need communications equipment and some heavy weapons, and their Chinese opponents would try to smuggle somebody off the train. So I made a voice memo about that. And this is how Apple's transcription rendered it:
Okay, so the first change we have to make is that they're going to need earbuds for communications. Weathers is going to have to recover that the Chinese holdrame of reception cru or something off the train so they establish pretty quickly We're trying to get off the train.. Panda and Crown are going to get heavy records.
The first sentence worked out, I suppose. I have no idea what the hell the rest of it is about. But I like the idea of spinning off a series about Panda and Crown, whoever they are. Some kind of crime-fighting plushies, maybe?
* Amusing sidenote, while I was dictating this sentence, Siri started up on my phone, explaining subscription services as a business model. I guess it heard ‘transcription’ as ‘subscription’ and thought I needed an explanation.