Ep 113: An Easy Solution for the Writer with Big Goals and Little Time
Ideas pop into my head all the time: while walking, doing household chores, waiting in a carpool lane, sitting poolside, or even as I'm just falling asleep. If I have paper and pen, great. I can write them down. Or if I have time to pull out my bluetooth keyboard and type them up, cool. We discussed some of my favorite writing tools last week.\n\nBut if you have a lot of ideas or a rich, detailed memory comes to you, wouldn\u2019t it be nice to record it fully and quickly, before it evaporates or you\u2019re distracted by something else? If you write fiction and the outline of a short story or an entire scene for your novel comes to you\u2014I\u2019ll bet you\u2019d love to have some way to rapidly, easily stash it away.\n\nWell, you can.\n\nGrab your phone and press record.\n\nYou can save your ideas easily and quickly if you write with your voice\u2014it\u2019s a solution for any writer with big goals and little time.\nVoice-to-Text\nMost phones\u2014iPhone or Android\u2014have a microphone icon on the keyboard, allowing you to speak your thoughts into just about any app. In the last episode, I mentioned the beauty of working in the apps that sync on all devices, like Evernote, Google Keep, Google Docs. You can leverage that same advantage of capturing on the go, but you can use your voice to do the writing.\n\nI\u2019m sure you\u2019ve found this microphone and used it for voice-to-text. I see people using it all the time\u2026just not for writing.\n\n\n\nMy husband, who is bilingual, discovered he can even switch the globe on his iPhone keyboard to French and dictate notes and thoughts, and it\u2019s worked well\u2026if he wanted to, he could write a love poem in his native tongue without having to remember where all the accents go.\n\nAnother iPhone advantage: you should have not only that little microphone-on-the-keyboard option\u2014you also have Siri, who can take dictation for you.\nSpeak Slowly, Clearly\nThough I tend to think most effectively through my fingers, typing my best thoughts on a keyboard, I\u2019ve used voice recording options many times, especially to get out some notes and ideas or even the start of a draft. And I\u2019ve learned to work on my elocution.\n\nYou as the writer might be brimming with ideas that spill out at record speed, but for dictation or transcription accuracy, it helps to speak slowly and clearly when using transcription tools of any kind.\nGoogle Voice Typing\nIn the last episode, I focused on ways to type out ideas. At my website,\xa0where the show notes live, I received an excellent comment from Susan, who wrote: "You can also dictate your written notes (or thoughts off the top of your head) right into a Google Doc."\n\nShe talked about its Voice typing feature. I'm so thankful Susan took time to mention that. This dictation device\u2014or, I guess it\u2019s more of a voice-to-text technology/software\u2014allows you to dictate straight into a Google doc so that your notes or a draft is waiting for you when you\u2019re able to get behind a keyboard.\n\nJust click on Tools, then \u201cVoice typing.\u201d You\u2019ll get a big popup microphone icon. Click and start talking. It\u2019s a great way to think and then speak your ideas.\n\n\nGoogle Keep\u2019s Voice-to-Text Recorder\nSusan pointed out that Google Keep also has a voice recording option.\n\n"Just tap the microphone at the bottom of the screen.\u201d Google Keep records a segment and then instantly transcribes it, giving you the option of saving the audio recording or deleting it after you have the transcription it produces, which is pretty nifty.\nEvernote, Voxer\nEvernote and Voxer have similar features. If you have Voxer Pro and you\u2019re an English-speaker, you can use their voice-to-text transcription.\n\nEvernote can record your voice and save that as an audio file, or you can use the keyboard microphone, as I mentioned before, to capture dictation directly into a note. It\u2019ll be saved in a note for you to open later.\nTranscription Services\nAnother approach to capturing content using your voice, is to record an audio file on some kind of recording devic...