Smartpens
Sunday, August 2nd, 2009I just spent my “walking” money to buy a lifescribe Pulse smartpen. (lifescribe.com)
Back when I was in college I took a lot of notes. Enough to really mess up my writings. But I noticed that the act of writing helped me to remember the lessons. In fact a lot of the time I didn’t have to review my notes much.
So at work I have been taking “notes” as I work. If I want to remember something I write it down in a note book. It helps but now that I am older I don’t remember as easy as I did when I was younger. So I often have to refer back to my notes. I got to thinking it would be nice to have digital copies so I could easily do searches. But it is more trouble than I liked to bring up a text editing window. Plus I do have to write things down in meeting. Thus I would have to key them in later or have two places for notes.
But I had been hearing about smart pens which digitally record what you write. I checked and there are two types. Ones that have a receiver you clip to the page and it picks up signals from the pen to figure out where the pen is and pens that use a special paper to figure out where the pen is writing. The Pulse is one that uses special paper. It also has a feature that as far as I know is currently unique to it. It can also record sound as you are writing. Then later you touch the pen to some writing and it plays the sounds that were recorded during the writing. This seems tailor made for students taking notes during a lecture and for journalist doing interviews. I don’t expect to use this feature much as most of my note taking happens at my desk. But I do plan to try it at my next staff meeting.
The pen for a student or journalist has a lot of benefits without ever connecting 14 to a computer. But it has a USB port to charge and send the info to the computer. Its desktop will show all the pages uploaded and if sound was recorded it can play it by mousing over then clicking.
But one drawback is that it doesn’t come with software to convert the writing to regular text. But there is a company that sells an add on to do that. I have a trial version. It seems to do a decent job. In fact I am writing this article in a book right now and plan to run it through to see how good it does.
So far after two days with it, I am pleased.
Note: The writing to text tests I done before this were short notes like I normally take and that worked pretty good, just few errors per page of notes. This multiple paragraph writing caused it more problems. In fact the error rate went up the further into the document. I would guess due to me getting sloppier the more I wrote. I may be pushed to slow down to give the OCR a chance.
