How Can I Do Dictation on My Computer Using My Voice Recorder?

I’ll give you an idea or two about setting it up, but then I’ll advise you not to bother.

My belief is with the state of today’s voice recognition technologies, down this path lies only frustration for the situation you describe.

Voice recognition today is still very touchy. It’s better than it was, but still not quite to the level we might want it to be.

It really works best with a good, clean sounding source. I would think that adding a voice recorder as an intermediate storage device seems like it would add a bit of noise and increase the error rate to an unacceptable level. And recording in a car or airplane is definitely going to involve some noise.

When using voice recording “live”, you can sort of watch what’s being “heard” and make corrections on the way. It might slow you down a little, but it can be manageable.

If you’re attempting voice recognition from a recording, you have no options. The recording is going to plow ahead no matter what errors are mis-recognized. My belief is you’ll spend as much time correcting the resulting text as you would have typing it in to start.

But, for the record, here’s how I’d try it:

• Get a stereo “patch cord” that you can then use to plug the headphone out on the voice recorder to the into the line in on your computer’s sound card.
• Alternately, use that same patch cord to headphone out to the computer’s microphone in. (And use lower volume settings as we proceed below.)
• Set up the voice recognition software on your PC for dictation, possibly transcribing into something like a Word document.
• Press play on your voice recorder.

In concept it’s very simple. In practice, not so much. There’s going to be a lot of trial and error before you figure out what speaking speed works best, as well as what recording and playback volume and other settings work best. On top of that, most voice recognition software need to be “trained”, which means that you’ll need to spend some time recording some stock speech that the software would then listen to in this manner to learn what it is you sound like.

What most folks do in a situation like this is use a human transcriber. There are still things that only a human can do effectively, and for now this is still one of them.

Many voice recorders actually save natively now in a computer audio format. I particularly like my Olympus WS-100 because it records to Windows “wma” format and has a USB interface; plug it in and it’s just another drive on my system with a bunch of audio files.

The reason that’s so handy is that there are many transcription and dictation services where you can email your audio file to them, and they respond with a written transcript of the contents. Unfortunately, I’ve not yet used any myself, so I don’t have a specific recommendation. I’ve heard of very cost-effective results using this technique, though, which is why I recommend it. It’s what I would do should the need arise.

Similarly, there are also “virtual assistant” services out there as well that will do this, and many other types of administrative tasks, whether you’re traveling or not. Depending on the dollar value of your own time, these can also be surprisingly cost effective ways to get things done.

And they’ll be significantly less frustrating than jury-rigging your voice recorder to your PC and getting a transcription full of errors.