Dictating Academic Writing

With the advent of a range of new transcription software and voice recognition apps the usefulness in academic writing of such services and devices is broadening. Just about every major provider of cellular and online services have jumped on board to create applications or programs which facilitate the transcription of voice to text for academic writing, and with a whole gambit of other purposes too.

Consequently there may be a whole lot of ways to use transcription with academic writing that you may never have considered before. There are the obvious bits and pieces like dictating reminders, brief notes and appointments. This isn’t new because transcription of relatively small bytes of voice data has been pretty good in the past. What is new is the option of recording large data files of voice.

Uses of Dictation & Transcription in Academic Writing

Dictate Lectures

Because new technology means that students can dictate straight into smart phones for long periods of time, you can now record entire lectures into your phone and have the text delivered to your email in-box by the time you get home. For anyone who despises taking notes this is the height of good fortune. You don’t need to miss anything or stress about writing fast enough to catch all the facts. In fact, if you have a willing friend, and attendance isn’t compulsory, you don’t even have to attend the lecture anymore.

Dictate Notes

When you aren’t in the lecture hall, maybe you are doing field work or you’re in the library studying, again the need for notes of academic writing is gone. Well the need for you to take the notes anyway. Simply dictate as you go along, data, graphs, results and academic sources can all be spoken into your Smartphone and you got it, it’s there in text when you arrive back at your computer.

Dictate Research Papers and Essays

Some people love to write with pen, pencil or to type into their computer. If you aren’t one of those people you may prefer to transcribe. You may actually prefer it anyway once you realize that the spoken word takes a quarter of the time to produce in contrast to the written word. That is to say that in the time you have spoken four pages of academic writing you will, on average, only type one page of academic writing.

It may take a little getting used to because it is a different way of documenting data but if you can get past it, there is a whole lot to say for speaking your academic writing.

What’s Different about Transcribing Academic Writing Today?

People who have tried transcription software or services in the past may be shaking their heads at this point. That’s because to date transcribing academic writing has been fraught with hassle. Fifty percent accuracy rates, slow return times and hours of editing meant it just wasn’t worthwhile. Add to that the need for a separate device to record dictation and it’s no surprise students haven’t previously embraced dictation services which transcribe for academic writing.

All that has changed with Smartphones and better transcription technologies. Not every service today will deliver accurate and fast text but, at long last, it is fair to say that some will. Today it is possible to dictate into a Smartphone and receive super accurate academic writing, super fast. Although the best of these academic writing services are still for the most part in beta stage, students can look forward to doing away with laborious note taking and writing in the very near future.