Otter Voice Notes and Transcription

Otter creates voice notes that combine audio, transcription and speaker identification for free on a desktop/laptop computer when online and with mobile and tablet apps. 

Otter is a real time speech recognition service, that can recognise different speakers in recorded sessions, allow you to download the output in text and audio as well as SRT.  It is really quite accurate even when using a desktop microphone with clear English speakers in a small room.  We have found it useful for note taking and transcribing interviews but have not tested it in a lecture theatre.  The free online version of Otter offers 600 minutes of transcription per month with unlimited cloud storage and synchronisation across devices.  Visit the App Store or Google Play for more features and reviews.

 The Premium version provides more features, such as names of speakers when they register and are recognised by recording a little bit of speech and 6,000 minutes of transcription per month.  PC Mag provided a review in June 2018 and mentioned that with the free plan, users get 600 minutes of transcriptions per month.

ECS Accessibility Team, University of Southampton. 

Coach’s Eye – Thinking Olympics – sports and practicals – video annotation

Coach's Eye app“Coach’s Eye is an iOS5 app available through iTunes for £3 that can be used on the iPhone iPad and iPod. It allows you to add audio and visual feedback to new and imported videos. Particularly useful for sports and performing arts although it could be used with providing feedback on any visual practical process e.g. silversmithing techniques. For some good examples of the app in use watch the YouTube video

The swimming and karate kick examples are fairly good.”

Kevin Brunton, Going mobile, apps and devices (download docx) ADSHE.

Adobe PDF to Word for text to speech and annotation

TextHelp scan document“Reading is big issue for me – I find it hard to concentrate on the content so I have to scan in documents so I use a program to read them back to help me focus and absorb more information. Quite often I download E-Journals and they are all set up in PDF format. But, when I come to use the software, it is quite hard so then I transfer it to a Word document.  It is much more user-friendly.

Basically, I have been used to using the software for TextHelp Read and Write [Gold] (YouTube video) and in that program you can scan the document – you can scan the PDF document and transfer it to a Word document” [This is also possible with ClaroRead (YouTube video)]

Tom – Sports Science BSc Hons