Hi guys!

Some of you may remember my question about the network I am going to implement at my father-in-laws. (see here). I’ve pretty much got the whole networking idea down, but yesterday my father-in law came up with something new.

The situation is the following:
He is a doctor, and always speaks his conclusions into a dictaphone. You know, one of those small tape recorders. He then hands over this tape to his secretary, which then types his conclusions into a document. For this she uses one of those dictaphone tape players with headphones, and a foot pedal with which she can control the playing/stopping of the tape player.

My father-in-law would like to see this digitized. Basically, he would need a digital dictaphone, which should record his voice no longer on tape, but in a digital file. The idea then is to email that file to his secretary, which should then again type out that entire file into a document.

Now… my question is: does anyone of you know which hardware would be up to this? Finding a dictaphone which records to .mp3 or .wav is probably not all that hard. (even though I have no idea where to look and/or which brands are any good, so tips are welcome!) But the real problem lies with the secretary. I’m guessing there probably is software out there somewhere which can play such a file, and can also be controlled by a foot pedal (via USB?), but where? Headphones are easily enough connected to nowadays PC’s so that’s not a problem.

Can anyone of you point me in the right direction? Which hardware should I buy? Or software? Any help is most welcome, because I have really no idea where to look for this...

Thanks!

Google search for USB Transcription Foot Pedal returns quite a few links, most pointing to the same Infinity IN-USB-1 product. Some of the sites list compatible software, so it's probably worth looking at the hardware first then looking at the software.

That looks pretty good! I suppose this pedal can then be used to control any media player like eg. Winamp. I'll dig a little bit deeper into that, but that should work. Thanks Tom!

Sooo... anybody any idea for a good quality digital dictaphone?

These people seem to know what they're talking about.

Cheers!
By now I've found out that Philips is a big player in this market. They have some very nice products. The downside seems to be that all their products use the .dss (digital speech system) file format instead of eg. mp3. This means the use of proprietary software.

Fortunately, I've also found software called Express Scribe which seems to be free (and works with the infinity pedal!), so the use of this .css file format doesn't have to be that bad.

I'll continue looking, but I'm already a bit further.

Thanks for the info guys!

Or get a socket for the existing pedal and wire it up to whatever port is appropriate:

http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/pedalwiring.html

If she still transcribes tapes for other people it could be inconvenient to change them over, but she might prefer to use one that she is already used to.

Thanks for that, but no, that won't be necessary because she only works for my father-in-law. And I don't think there's much getting used to different pedals. (but then again: what do I know? )

Olympus & Sony do them, I suspect you can't go far wrong with a well known brand...

Hugo

Would it be possible to integrate a program like Dragon Naturally Speaking into the workflow in place of the secretary and the dictaphone?

I'll pipe in here, as we use express scribe at work. It works flawlessly, but there is one MAJOR design flaw. It allows you to open as many mp3's as you like, but every time it opens one, it converts it to a wav file. As we deal in council meetings that can last 6-7 hours, the files can grow to larger than a couple of gigs. Normally, not an issue, but on more than one occasion, the secretary's computers started acting strangely, until I noticed that they had ~10 Megs free on the HDD.

Whoa! That's indeed one helluva design flaw! I'll look at bit further. Maybe I'll find some alternative software...

Thanks!

Buy a bigger HD?

One thing is that express scribe is free, so try it out if you like.

Oh, I will, thanks!

One thing I've been meaning to ask you: when it converts the files to .wav, does this happen on-the-fly, without the user noticing it? And where does it store these files? In the same directory as where the mp3 is?

Because if that is the main problem, I can always say they to just delete all those .wav files, say once a week...

Yes, it's on the fly. The only way they'd notice is if they are trying to skip a ways ahead before it has had a chance to convert to wav. They can open an MP3, and start transcribing immediately. Unfortunately, in our case, they normally do verbatims of only a specific part of the meeting, say starting in hour four. They must wait until it has converted at least that much.

Oh, and wav path is \Program Files\NCH Swift Sound\Scribe\Current Files.

I can only assume that emailing largish files from your phone costs much less in the UK than the US. Some sort of automated Bluetooth solution would probably make more sense.

"Do you use a dictaphone?"

"No, I use my finger like everybody else."


Sorry, I'll get my coat...

Yeah, I hadn't heard that one yet until seeing it in this thread. Sprung it on someone last weekend, they laughed for like five minutes.

Ok, so everything is slowly coming together. I've already determined that I'll buy a Philips 9600 disctaphone. This device uses DSS pro as a codec.

My question now is: I'd like to know how much kB/s this thing will use. That way it'll be possible for me to approx. determine how much disk space I will need per year.

Anybody have any idea? I can't seem to find this on any of the 'official' sites...

Cheers!

This isn't an 'official' site, but it seems to answer your question.

Stu

indeed exactly what I needed!
Cheers!