Chasing the Dragon

MANILA, Philippines - It’s an elusive dream of journalists, especially those who have to whip out tape recorders on a regular basis to conduct interviews: how to get somebody else to transcribe the damn thing.

Nobody I know likes typing out their interviews, especially if these recordings run 30, 40, or 60 minutes long. We’d rather do something more productive and fun, like posting photos of yesterday’s lunch on Facebook.

So it was with more than casual interest that I downloaded Dragon Dictation, a free iTunes application, to my iPad. (It’s also available for the iPhone, as is a not-free computer version that presumably comes with more bells and whistles.)

Dragon Dictation is pretty simple. You open the app, press the “Tap and Dictate” red button and speak into the microphone. The app renders your words into English text (perhaps other languages are available; I haven’t checked). This file can then be saved on your iPad or iPhone, or e-mailed to yourself. And  surprise!  the accuracy is not too shabby: about 75 percent.

That may not sound so impressive, but that’s 75 percent fewer words you’ll have to type out. The thing is, we’ve all been searching for such a holy grail  short of paying a court stenographer to type up our interviews  for years. And now, technology has finally caught up with us, at least to the point of providing us a free app. Sweet!

So does this help us lazy journalists with our transcribing? My wife, who hates transcribing even more than I do, gladly field-tested the app after finishing a recent interview. We practiced by taking our digital recorder and playing the interview back in front of the iPad microphone. Not surprisingly, with all the ambient room noise, pauses and lingual fluctuations, accuracy was pretty crappy: about 25 percent.

So other methods needed to be tested. I suggested Therese put her headphones on, play back the recording and recite the words again directly into the microphone, slowly and crisply, in her best dulcet reading tones. We checked the file: accuracy shot up again to about 75 percent. Hey, it works!

There are drawbacks. Dragon Dictation only creates short text files, about one to two minutes at a shot, then it automatically starts “processing.” You then have to save the text as a file, or shoot it to your e-mail, to continue. You then create a new file, and so on, and later stitch all the files together. Also, you need to be near a WiFi source for it to work (I’m not sure why; presumably for sending the files later).

Dragon does other useful stuff, such as understanding dictation commands. If you need a comma or period or dash inserted, you just say “comma,” “period” or “dash” at the appropriate time. Voila: punctuation appears.

I did my own test, reciting Abe Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” (“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation…”) into Dragon Dictation. There were some weird mistranslations (“We are met on a great battlefield” became “We are Madonna great battlefield”) but overall, accuracy was about 90 percent.

Is it worth all the effort of reciting back what you’ve already recorded? Well, anyone who dreads having to type out another droning speaker or long-winded interviewee  fingers flying across the keys and mind daydreaming of other, more pleasant matters  will dig it like crazy. Plus, the mere removal of high-speed typing saves lots of wear and tear on the fingers and wrists. (Goodbye, carpal tunnel!) It just requires a clear speaking voice, kind of like listening to a speaker at the UN, then translating it back to a dictating machine.

Of course, there is the editing you’ll have to do with the files later. But this is not so bad. Having tried it on a couple taped interviews, Therese now swears by her Dragon; she says it’s still quicker than typing and rewinding the tape. If you take your time reading back the material, the app is fairly accurate, though it will miss some proper nouns and brand names. She calls it her “best-kept secret,” though we both still pine for the day when there’s an app that can handle actual audio recordings, ambient noise and all. Actually, there is a “professional” version of the program that costs about $200, but it’s for PCs, we’re Mac users, and it reportedly still hasn’t cracked that background noise problem.

Dictation was actually devised for CEOs and business types to dictate letters (duh!), but with a little tweaking, you can use it to eliminate that part of writing that many of us in the biz have grown to hate: the actual typing.