4 replies to this topic

[Big Wally]

  Shorthand is a dying skill and taking thorough meeting minutes can be a rough exercise. Maybe I am just a dreamer but I figure since Alexander Graham Bell started a dictaphone company 1881 there must be some software that can digitally record a meeting and have it put into a word or pdf format.

 

Has anybody found anything like this?

 

 

[Ryan M.]

I'm aware of Dragon dictation software.  It is speech recognition and documents the speech.  I don't know how effective in a meeting with multiple persons talking.

 

http://www.nuance.com/dragon/index.htm

 

I used it about 8 years ago testing it for grading papers (I was teaching at that time) and it worked ok, but not great.  That was 8 years ago though and I didn't have the best microphone.

[FurFarmandFork]

Back when I secretaried, I would record the meeting while making shorthand notes and transcribe after the fact, but it took hours.

 

First ask how much you need meeting minutes to be that thorough, how often will someone actually be reading them? Maybe instead cover the main subjects/decisions made in the meeting in a quick "minutes" document, and just save a recording of the meeting somewhere for that rare instance in which you want to hear what actually took place.

[Big Wally]

Thanks Ryan. I called Nuance about the Dragon software and they said it only works for a single speaker. I followed with, you mean only one person speaking at a time? (Difficult in itself) lol, they said no, only 1 person.

[QAGB]

Thanks Ryan. I called Nuance about the Dragon software and they said it only works for a single speaker. I followed with, you mean only one person speaking at a time? (Difficult in itself) lol, they said no, only 1 person.

  Yep! That is correct. Most of the time speech recognition software programs have to "learn" the way one actually speaks. Speech recognition software programs tend to take a user through various exercises of words and phrases so that it can "learn" to recognize your voice and how you pronounce words and so forth. With that being said, it would probably turn into a disaster to have more than a single speaker because the software would try to transcribe speech heard from someone else based on your info.

 

I tried using speech recognition software before. It also was a few years ago for me as well, and the experience was very "glitchy". I found myself repeating the same words over again, even after the software "learned" my speech pattern. As for meetings,  we usually just jot down the main ideas of the topics we have (as FurFarm&Fork stated); perhaps we aren't quite as in depth as some, but it works for us. I've not heard of anything else out on the market that will do something as you described.

 

QAGB