A few months ago I bought a Rode Wireless Go wireless microphone, and I’m probably one of the few people who uses it in a way the folks at Rode’s Sydney headquarters never quite intended.
Sure, I clip it to my camera when I need decent audio without a cable mess. But the use case I’m actually excited about is something else entirely: dictation walks.
Quick bit of context. For years I’ve been experimenting with different software and hardware setups to be able to dictate text anywhere, anytime. The motivation is simple — I don’t want to be chained to a desk. Movement keeps the brain ticking. That’s not just my personal theory; it’s backed by science. So why would anyone sit rigidly in front of a screen all day?
I’ve worked my way through quite the evolution. First I dictated into a Tascam recorder or my phone, then transferred the file to my Mac and ran it through Dragon Dictate for transcription. That was proper tedious and took ages. Then I discovered some clever iPhone apps that let me dictate and transcribe in near real-time. I still use those sometimes.
But phones have a major downside: I simply don’t trust them sitting in my pocket while I’m talking for an hour straight. It’s happened too many times — I dictate heaps of material on a long walk, and then the recording just dies because a battery warning popped up and killed the session. So for about a year now, I’ve been carrying a small Sony voice recorder for longer dictation walks. The little device lives in my pocket, and apart from the screen being impossible to read in the sun, I’m very happy with it.
Paired with the Wireless Go, it’s a compact and reliable setup for dictating large volumes of text. Yes, I have to plug the recorder into my computer at home to get the audio file into the cloud, then transcribe it with Ada Dictation — my current favourite. But that only takes a few minutes, and the reliability makes it worth the extra step.
In 2021, I plan to dictate and transcribe even more. You’ll be reading plenty of the results right here.
This started life in German on reinergaertner.de, my blog since 1997. The English version was AI-assisted. My German-trained eyes may have missed a few things along the way. She’ll be right.