Becca’s Cyber Home

It’s been 3 days since I first unboxed my Livescribe Pulse pen, and I’m still eagerly finding excuses to write in my notebook and journal. It’s been a long time since handwriting has been this much fun!

Audio recording – phone calls

The concept of being able to record audio that is tied to the text you write really sold me on the pen. That’s just too cool! So the Pulse comes with earbuds that have built-in mics (in addition to the mic that’s built in to the pen itself). When I saw that I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could record my phone calls?” See, I spend almost all day, every day, on conference calls at work. It’s the cost of a global economy, I suppose. I have teams in India, Brazil, Germany, and the UK, not to mention spread out in all time zones in the US. My most exciting discovery is that I can, indeed, record my conference calls!

I use a one-ear headset for my calls. A user on the Livescribe forums suggested putting the earbud in your ear, then putting the headset over it. I was skeptical, to say the least. I figured there would be too much interference from the earbud/mic scraping against the headset ear piece. Or at least the sound quality would be too diminished to be useful. I was wrong!

The sound is so much better than I imagined. I can hear audio from the phone just as well as I can hear my own voice. There’s no interference and it captures everything. I was blown away! The only problem I had was having two ear piece devices with cords. My headset is not cordless, and the earbuds have cords, so there were a few times I got tangled up in all the cords around my neck and on my desk.

Text recognition

In my last post I showed you a digital capture of my journal. When you dock the Pulse, the Livescribe Desktop automatically imports the latest sessions from your pen. Then you can access the pages in the “Current Notebooks” window (image 1). Here’s where it gets cool: say I wanted to see my journal pages where I mention my SCN projects (image 2). All I have to do is select my journal and enter “SCN” in the search box. Then Livescribe Desktop will show results highlighted on images of my pages (image 3). Holy Toledo, I do a little happy dance every time I try it!

I’ve done dozens of text searches and all of them have been accurate. However, I only have a few pages entered into the tool, so I don’t have a large source from which to experiment yet.

Now, the text recognition could get WAY cooler. Right now you can only search your Pulse writing sessions from the Livescribe Desktop application, and there isn’t an export feature. However, buzz on the Livescribe Forums indicate that Livescribe is developing an export feature so you can export your Pulse sessions as text (no official ETA on that though). When you can pull your Pulse sessions into third-party applications, like Word, then it will worthy of many a happy dance. Not just a little booty-shaking jig, but a full-on flailing, ecstatic, whirligig of a dance. I can’t wait!

Livescribe in real life

So, how useful are these features, really? Well, as I’ve mentioned, I can now record my project calls. For someone with as faulty a memory as mine, this is a heaven-sent capability. But think about the recording capability for journalists and writers–now your interviews have the audio and text tied together. I ran across a teacher online who uploaded an audio and text session for his students because they were having a hard time understanding the assignment he gave that day. And wouldn’t this have been handy in college?! If you miss a lecture, your buddy can upload his audio and text session so you can hear everything that was presented that day. For study purposes, this takes flash cards to a whole new level. Yes, I love my new toy!