Verified purchaser
Definitely a Go!
I've been using the Speech to Note app quite extensively and I'm honestly thrilled with its performance. The transcriptions are top-notch and incredibly handy right off the bat.
Just one thing to show how good the Speech to Note results are. I wrote a custom prompt for a gratitude journal. The transcript should be summarized, and the three things I am grateful for should be listed within the summary as a listicle. This worked wonderfully on the first try.
Yet, I've noticed a few areas that could use some polishing.
The pre-set prompts aren't really hitting the mark for me. They're a bit overdone for my taste. Creating custom prompts in the Pro version has been my savior, especially for summaries, which have been working wonders – for me better than the ones in AudioPen, which I´m using for quite some time now, too.
Speaking of custom prompts, six just isn't enough. Bumping that limit up to 10 or 15 would be super helpful. And, honestly, I wouldn't mind if there were fewer pre-made prompts to make room for more custom ones.
I'm also keeping my fingers crossed for an offline recording feature in the works! The ability to record without internet would be a game-changer for me given that I use Speech to Text often outdoors without internet connection.
UI-wise, the app is user-friendly and intuitive, but the option to create folders, rather than just tags, would be a neat addition for organization. And about saving mp3s – I'd be game to pay an extra ltd to keep them stored permanently. Also I would like to see longer filenames for the mp3, which now show only a portion of the original note title, which makes it hard to sort them together.
I've rigged my prompts to default to my language, which works fine, but a standard language setting feature would make things smoother. The 'first-person perspective' function could use some tweaks, but nothing major.
It'd be super cool to be able to extend a completed recording with additional audio to update the transcription – a real next-level feature.
While I didn’t find it critical, more control over the text output length and the 'temperature and creativity' settings could be nice for fine-tuning. Also, a full-text search option within records (transcripts) would be great.
For downloading, it's a bit cumbersome to select the download path on my laptop each time. A 'batch download' with a one-time path selection, possibly with a zip option, would streamline the process.
The tags system could also display multiple tags at once in the overview and allow for direct modification without going into detail view. Adding a confirmation step when deleting a tag could prevent accidental removals (which happened to me when I confused "remove" and "delete").
When selecting tags on mobile, the dropdown is quite narrow, and the automatic keyboard pop-up is a tad bothersome (at least on my Android device). Some improvement there and allowing default tags for new recordings would be fantastic (I use a tag "not downloaded" to mark new mp3s for later downloading).
Lastly, the cherry on top would be the ability to paste text directly for summaries, in addition to uploading mp3s.
All in all, the app deserves way more than five tacos! It's become an invaluable tool that I use daily.
Thanks for your amazing work, and I'm excited to see how the app evolves.
Ideas:
- Please allow more custom prompts!
- Offline recording feature would be a game-changer
- Continuation of already transcribed recordings
- Option for permanently saving the MP3s
- Include full titles in the MP3 file names
- Simplified download process for multiple files
- Folder functionality in addition to tags could simplify organization.
- Standard language setting would be useful
- Full-text search
- Improved tag overview and management
- More user-friendly dropdown menus on mobile devices
Pros:
Everything else :-)
P.S.: I wrote quite a lot about things to polish. That is just because I am so excited about the product that I want to share my ideas about it. Even without such additional features Speech to Note is absolutely great in the actual state of development.
abhishek_ux
May 9, 2024Hey Cam, thank you so much, first of all, for such a detailed and thorough review. I appreciate all the ideas that you have pitched in, and I would love to sort of take all of them to our drawing board and work on them one by one.
You would be happy to know that we will be bumping up the limit of custom prompts to 50 very soon. Not 10 or 15, but 5, 0, 50.
And offline recording will come as we will release the native mobile app. So that will give you the ability to record things offline on the go as well.
For continuation of already transcribed recordings, we have some crazy ideas in our mind which we are currently just brainstorming. We will see how the user experience of it evolves and comes to the limelight.
For the option of permanently saving the mp3's, we are thinking of coming up with a storage plan directly in Speech to Note which can give you the flexibility to store up to 20, 30, 40 GBs. We are thinking like you know how to structure that up for each one of the users, and how to open up a window for subscription for that as well, but we'll keep you in the loop.
Including full titles in the mp3 file names, we are working that one out, it is slightly buggy, but we will release a solidify version of that very soon.
Simplified download process for the multiple files is quite a great option I think, when we will move to the folder structure functionality, which is also one of your points, will cater to both of these requirements. You will have the ability to download multiple things as a zip, and then you will also have the capability to download mp3s along the way as well.
Standard language setting is a very quick, fire thing that we need to look at, probably we will try to release a solution for this in coming couple of updates.
Full text search is slightly challenging with respect to the kind of encryption that we are using behind the scenes. So, full text search also means allowing our search model to look into your notes data as well. We might have to update our privacy policy with respect to that, as our search algorithm will start looking for notes data as well. As of now, it only looks at the title, so your encrypted note data will get exposed to the search algorithm, if we are providing you full text search. Let's see how we can explore that option even further.
Improved tag overview and management, I completely agree on that fact. Let's see how we can do that in the coming days. We do have very thorough plans for a new UI structure, so we are currently working on that. It will take probably next three to six months, or a little more time as one of the biggest challenges is to add functionalities but being very cautious about the user experience as well.
And then yes, more user-friendly drop downs on mobile devices, that’s a bang on point. We will definitely consider that.
But thank you so much for such a thorough and an amazing review. Really appreciate all of the words that you have written and really looking forward to catering to you here at Speech to Note community.
Thank you so much.