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Digital voice recorders that work with a PC are nothing new - we looked at the Walkabout Quest from Dictaphone last October - but the new Mobile Organizer from Dragon takes working with your voice on the move one step further by adding speech recognition to the equation.
The Organizer fits nicely in the hand or your jacket pocket, and the MiniDisc-style editing functions make manipulating recordings a cinch.
Keeping track of audio is easy with up to 99 folders at your disposal and a backlit LED screen that shows what's saved where. The 4Mb of onboard memory is enough for 40 minutes of translatable speech, or 74 minutes of low-quality audio, and you can add additional capacity with SmartMedia cards.
Since the Organizer's operation relies entirely on voice recognition, success or failure hinges on the quality of the bundled software. Thankfully, recognition comes courtesy of version 4 of Dragon's NaturallySpeaking Preferred (we awarded version 3 a Best Buy back in October), so transcription is accurate and training easy.
Although you have to learn some phrases like 'scratch that' to delete the last words you spoke, or 'jabberwocky' to separate items, what you say is more or less what you get, with errors few and far between.
So what kind of things can you use the Organizer for? Well, you can compose email for starters. If, for example, you say: 'Create an email to Fred Bloggs regarding Tuesday. We're meeting at 2pm in the penthouse suite', an appropriate email pops up on the PC's screen as soon as you connect the Organizer. Click OK and it's automatically sent to the recipients using the email address given in your PC's address book. You can also schedule appointments by similar methods, create tasks that are acted upon by your contact program and dictate short documents for editing in a word processor.
Although the system works well, how useful it is really depends on two things: how much work you do with your voice already, and whether you can wait until you connect to your PC for stacked-up tasks to be actioned.
But if you currently spend ages typing up notes from your portable tape recorder at the end of each day, then there's no contest - the Dragon Mobile Organizer wins hands down even if cassette based systems are significantly cheaper.
Contact Dragon Systems 01628 894150
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