We all loaded an app onto our mobile devices that claimed to be “free”, only to find that the key feature was effectively disabled or blocked.
Speechnotes meets these cynical expectations by providing great features that you can use for free on Android mobile devices or any computer running the Chrome browser.
But is this Google Speech engine reuse worth it, even if it's free?
Costs
The basic functionality of Speechnotes is free and you can use it without spending any money.
For those who want to support the developer, Rehavat Ilan, Speechnotes Premium can be purchased through the Chrome Web Store for €9 per year. This great investment gives you the joys of unlimited continuous voice typing and dictation, voice typing on any website, fast editable stamps with the extension, and no ads.
You also get Premium access to our support and can make feature requests. And you can enjoy all future updates as they appear.
A new feature recently launched is Speechnotes Files, an audio and video file transcription service where you can send files that are then transcribed using software.
This service is billed at just 10 cents a minute or less, making it very affordable.
This service requires you to add credit to use later for transcribing, and you can purchase in blocks of 45 minutes, 120 minutes, 10 or 20 hours. Each is billed at the same rate, so buying 20 hours costs €120 and ten hours costs €60.
For the purposes of this review, we'll be focusing on standard Speechnotes, but for just €4.50 to buy credit, it's not expensive to try Speechnotes files.
As a welcome gift, Speechnotes offers 10% extra time on your first purchase.
Being a software solution, Speechnotes Files is 95% accurate for high-quality audio, but generally 80% is what most users should expect.
Systems using human transcribers can often achieve 98 or 99%, but they only cost much, much more per minute of audio.
Supported file formats include aac, m4a, avi, mp3, mp4, mpeg, ogg, raw, flac, wav, mov, and amr, and do not support physical media.
Integrated
As far as web apps go, this is a remarkably simple app designed to run smoothly on just about any hardware that Chrome can run on.
The app page features an icon-based menu on the left, a workspace in the center, and some reminders on how to deal with punctuation on the right.
An essential icon is the microphone, since this allows the application to listen and transcribe what is said in the work area.
The first time you click on this icon, the app will ask for permission to access the microphone, and once provided, you can get started.
Once you complete a session, you can click on another icon to have the words spoken to you. In our experience, listening to written or transcribed content is a great way to find flaws, as you can often notice things that the scan doesn't catch visually.
Captured words can be saved as a text file or Word document, emailed, printed, uploaded to Google Drive, and automatically saved to the system.
It is possible to log in and insert the cursor for edits or additions, allowing much longer documents to be created for multiple uses.
It is not designed for many recording sessions as there is no folder structure to organize the stored files.
Supported languages are those that Google Assistant understands, and this includes a wide range of regional English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic, as well as several other European and Asian languages.
android app
Along with the Chrome browser solution, Speechnotes is also available as an Android app that should work on any modern Android phone or tablet with a microphone.
What's a bit confusing with the Android solution is that it works differently than the Chrome app because you can't verbalize the score.
Instead, when you capture a note on your phone or tablet, an on-screen punctuation keyboard is provided where you can write it by hand.
This difference provides a speed advantage, but it's also annoying if you use the Chrome solution and then try to use it, as they require slightly different skills to master.
But the other elephant in this room is the one already built into Android, and using the same core technology is a feature that enables the insertion of spoken words into any app using the microphone icon on the on-screen keyboard.
We also noticed that notes created on the phone don't show up in the Chrome app, or vice versa, which is disappointing.
Export
One limitation of this tool is that it only has two output formats, text files and Word documents.
It is also possible to copy the text to the clipboard, allowing it to be pasted into any other suitable software running on the system. And, if you save to Google Drive, it will automatically use text formatting instead of giving you a choice.
It seems odd, given your connections to Google, that generating a Google Doc isn't an option.
Accuracy
For our tests, we read John Donne's classic short poem "No Man Is An Island," and even our first attempt was a reasonably successful exercise.
Some of the mistakes he made were due to our pronunciation as we don't often use words like “headland” in our office.
What requires some adaptation is that for the content to be correctly formatted, all punctuation must be added explicitly. So if you want to start a new section, you have to say "new line" or "new paragraph" for the system to do it.
There is no logic that assumes long pauses are the start of a new section or grammatical logic that understands why question marks are needed.
And they don't list all the possible punctuation marks that it includes, but they chose to include in the list that you can add an emoticon.
The inference, if you don't get it, is that this tool was probably designed to quickly generate emails without a keyboard and is suitable for that purpose.
Overall, like the Google technology it's based on, it's not amazing, but it's usable.
Security
The only security offered by the system is that used by Google. Depending on users' Google account settings, this can range from reasonable security to almost negligible.
If you choose not to bother with Google's two-factor authentication, your account won't be well protected, and neither will the notes you take with it.
final verdict
Speechnotes isn't the most sophisticated solution available, but not everyone is looking for 100% accuracy and the ability to translate cockney rhyming slang.
What Speechnotes offers is an easy way to turn live speech into written words, and for that modest goal, it's often successful.
Our only real complaint is that the Chrome tool and the Android app don't demonstrate any single design thinking or even a common repository for notes taken.
Where the Chrome app has value, Android's inherent functionality makes this version of Speechnotes a bit redundant. But if you have very occasional needs to quickly convert spoken words to text, Speechnotes can help you on both platforms.