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Dictation apps
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: May 1, 2015
Your phone or tablet are always with you. And yet, you wait until you get back to the office to do your dictation, or you use a separate recorder to create your notes.
Well, there are a few good dictation apps for your phone.
At optimal use, they can even be used in conjunction with transcription programs, so that you can talk into your phone in the car, make the changes you need in the recording, and then have your computer type out your notes.
First of all, dictation apps are far more complex than just apps that record your voice (of which there are many).
The couple of really good dictation apps, which only cost from $2 to $10 or so, can be edited on the fly, and voice data can be added or subtracted, among other functions.
Of the straight recording apps, one of the most powerful is Recordence, which has numerous input and output capabilities. You can add tags and color categories to your recordings. The recordings are then grouped by color.
Recordence is a good tool to replace a handheld recorder, for recording witness statements and interviews, accident scene investigations, etc. The files can then be sent to any number of storage functions (Dropbox, Gmail. Send by Bluetooth, etc.).
But the dictation apps are where the real power is. Two frequently mentioned in the legal context are Dictadroid (Android) and Dictmus (for Android and iOS).
Dictadroid is the less expensive of the two and may have more functionality.
Dictadroid has the ability to insert speech into the recording without having to record over anything, just by scrolling back to the point where you want to insert something and then recording. Nothing else in the recording is affected.
It has uninterrupted recording, so, if you get a phone call, it doesn’t stop the recording.
The app has a colored slide indicating whether or not the recording is too loud, or not loud enough, and the ability to adjust the sampling rate. It can also share the recording with the usual suspects (email, Dropbox, etc.).
Dictamus is $10, the most expensive of these apps. This app has tremendous sound quality, secure data sharing, but does not have the “insert here” function.
At these prices, though, you can afford to try them all out and figure out which is best for you.