Quickly Convert Your Written Notes to Digital With This App
When it comes to notes, I’m still old school. I always have a little notebook in my purse and really enjoy taking notes on paper when I’m at press events, wine tastings, or just trying to make vacation plans with friends. While I really enjoy taking these paper notes, there always comes a time when I want these paper notes to be digital. Brill is an app that can help.
Brill is an iOS app that lets you convert these written notes to digital by simply taking a photo. So I can take my carefully crafted paper notes in this notebook, take pictures, and instantly have a digital version that I can send to my friends. I once had a fancy digital pen that did the same thing but required you to use special paper – it works with everything from cocktail napkins to sticky notes.
However, this is not ideal. Brill notes that you need to use clear handwriting and not overlap your notes for the feature to work, which is honestly sometimes easier said than done. While most of my notes probably fit this bill, when I take tons of notes at an event where there can be a lot of conversation, the faster the conversation is, the sloppier my letter will be and the more sloppy Brill’s translation will be.
The real advantage here is that tons of data are immediately digitized. Depending on the quality of your handwriting, you can then clean up the digital text to make it correct.
You can also use the app to record text notes during the meeting. The Click to Dictate button lets you create an audio recording of your presentation and then get a text version of that recording in real time.
Again, this won’t be perfect, especially if the speaker has a strong accent or is not very close to your phone, but it is significantly better than nothing. You also have to press and hold the microphone button for this to work, so this is actually more for short dictations than for recording entire meetings.
If you are looking for something to record your entire meeting, I recommend Otter Voice Notes. I wrote a little about this last year and use it regularly in interviews and other musical events. With it, you can record everything and get an approximate real-time transcription.
Like Brill, it won’t be perfect, but searchable. I regularly record an hour of events and then use the app’s search function later to highlight 15 minutes of that hour that I really want to listen to later because let’s face it, the last thing any of us wants to do is relive a long meeting. …