Blog via Speech!

I love being an early adopter where I can; the trouble is, it usually means more work.

Take today, for example: A student at my school wanted to interview me for the Leaver’s Year Book.

So, I had a great idea: why not record the interview, and then use some mp3 -> speech software to write the text rather than having to transcribe it.

In my Googling, I found this amazing service called SpinVox.

The idea is that you record your blog as speech via a phone number, and then SpinVox automatically changes it into text.

There’s obviously got to be a cost to this – and that’s perfectly reasonable, as it’s an amazing idea. Think of the possibilities for three-way phone calls, and so on.

How does it cope in practice?

Here’s my first result:

“Well this is the first lot entry. I’ve done via my mobile phone. I’m actually speaking it rather than writing it. Using an application called SpinVox. So let’s see how it does.”

It should’ve read:

“Well this is the first blog entry I’ve done via my mobile phone. I’m actually speaking it rather than writing it. Using an application called SpinVox. So let’s see how it does.”

HOW’S THAT?!!!!!

Bear in mind I was in a building with thick walls & the signal wasn’t brilliant (3 orange bars at best rather than green bars in terms of signal strength).

So, will I be using it to do blogs? You BET I will!

Give it a try & let me know how you get on.

PS: If anyone can get it to integrate with their (self-hosted) WordPress blog successfully, let me know, as I have some unresolved technical issues with the remote publishing backend that comes with WordPress (& I also tried some plugins which allow for remote blogging via email, but none worked 🙁 ).