Doing it again ain’t so much fun

I had an enjoyable work session in the outdoors yesterday. Got to walk around our local parks and visit the deer and ducks…

All while making the most of modern technology. Specifically: AI transcription.

It’s pretty cool:

I can just speak my emails and ideas. And they’ll be converted into (mostly) accurate text.

I was feeling pretty chuffed because I’d taken great recordings for some client work. And for my own stuff — including emails, of course.

But the shock came when I arrived home…

Turns out some of the recordings were just so crappy that the transcription was next to useless.

😾

But not all of them were unusable.

In fact, some transcriptions were actually pretty reasonable.

What gives?

Well…

When I was recording I had my headset on. And expected the microphone from that to be used for recording.

Seems my phone had other ideas and was recording from the phone mic instead.

I’m really not sure why. Probably will pay to figure that out though.

So the times when I was holding my phone and waving it about: fine.

The times when I stuck it in my pocket: not so much.

I’m rather annoyed because I had tried to do an initial double-check that the recording was working.

And it sounded like it was picking up OK when I did.

But again… only because the phone was in my hand.

I hate having to repeat work.

Especially due to that needling thought: My ideas and words might not be as good as the first effort.

Now… me telling you all this is part of my complimentary service to you:

Making the mistakes… so you don’t have to!

(I’m sure that’s why you signed up for my email list, right? 😜)

You can bet this won’t happen next time I have a “working walk”.

And, in case it needs saying:

Make sure your phone is set up correctly before recording an hour’s worth of audio for transcription.

And the usual old-school advice still holds for typing: Save often. Keep backups.

Steak puns are a rare medium to be done well,

Ready to build your email list? Go here…

Chris Milham