Evaluating Reqall's audio to text transcription service

Jul 9, 2010

I heard about Reqall.com here, and thought the idea was awesome - you send audio to a service via e-mail and it transcribes it for you and sends it back. I'd like to be able to take audio-based notes with Evernote and Reqall sounded perfect. After evaluating it for a bit, I think I'm going to have to wait on integrating it into my workflow. Here are my thoughts:

It touts Evernote integration, but it only integrates by pulling data from Evernote to match the internal notes. I would need it to send the transcription to Evernote
There is a 30 second limit - perfect for quick to-do items, but not for random journaling.
The test I did transcribed perfectly, which was really cool.

If I found out that I was able to work with the 30 second limit, I could have the transcription forwarded to my Evernote e-mail account, which would add it in - albeit without any tags.

I've checked out Google Voice for transcription services, but it's limited to 3 minutes. If it was worth it, you could just keep leaving 3 minute voice mails and see how well the audio transcribes.

Comments

Submitted by Gregg Marshall (not verified) on Sat, 07/10/2010 - 06:43.

I presume you have already looked at Jott (http://www.jott.com).

One service I've used for my voice mail for a couple of years is PhoneTag (http://www.phonetag.com). It does an amazing job.

I recently noticed a link on their website for an API and discovered you can sign up for an account that lets you feed arbitrary length audio for either automated or human augmented transcriptions.

I had the same idea as you to do use text to speech to allow indexing of audio and video, much like I let ABBYY OCR handle indexing of scanned images. If you really want well indexed video, check out Altus (http://www.altuscorp.com), that's what they do for Cisco, etc.

Submitted by admin on Sat, 07/10/2010 - 23:21.

Hey, thanks Gregg. Looks like Jott and PhoneTag would be good solutions for transcribing the quick note. I wasn't able to find a clear offering on Altus, and their web site gives the impression that they target enterprise clients, but I sent them an e-mail just to see what I should expect for video transcription services on a small scale.

Thanks for the leads!

Submitted by Nick Gilbert (not verified) on Thu, 08/05/2010 - 15:17.

It's important to point out that with Reqall the text is transcribed by *humans* - not a computer - hence the delay. There are serious privacy implications to this if you also mention any personally identifiable information in the message!

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