If you still take notes with a pen and paper, you may want to consider the wide array of software options for dictation. Whether you need coverage for your law firm, physician’s practice or you’re just tired of taking notes by hand, these five dictation apps can help bring your business into the digital age.
Dragon Dictation
Dragon Dictation from Nuance Communications is a free-of-charge dictation app for iOS. It’s an attractive option for people who want a lot of add-on services. You can talk into it and post the results to Facebook, Twitter or even to an email. You can also send yourself notes and reminders—a handy feature for forgetful people.
Dictadroid
Dictadroid is one of the best apps around for Android phones. It has a clean, easy-to-use, intuitive interface for people who aren’t super techy. You can send the results to email, Dropbox or Google Drive, making it easy to stay connected via your data plan. Dictadroid comes with access to Quicktate, a professional-level, pay-as-you-go transcription service. For anyone who wants a hard copy of what they’re dictating, accept no substitutes.
Dictatmus
Dictamus is another note-taking iOS app, and has probably the cleanest interface of any dictation software on the market. Easily rewind, overwrite and manipulate your dictation as you see fit. Emailing notes is easy, as is transmitting them to a third-party cloud service such as Dropbox. The sound quality is superb, making it easy to listen to what you recorded when you need to.
Voice Answer
If you like a bit of style with substance, you may like Voice Answer, an iOS app with great design in the form of a cool robotic personal assistant, offering dictation and more. Voice Answer provides answers to the burning questions you have while you’re taking notes: just ask and it responds. Voice Answer is essentially a beefed up Siri that does everything Siri can do (including transcription) and more.
Dictation Station
Dictation Station is a dictation solution for Windows Phones. It translates oral speech into just about any kind of text you need, from emails to blogs, text messages and even Word documents. Whatever you want to do, you can do without typing a single letter using Dictation Station. It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it’s so powerful in terms of versatility that it’s a hard app to pass up.
While the five dictation apps above are all excellent, at the end of the day, most dictation software has similar attributes. The key thing to look for is how well one of them integrates into whatever you need it to.