Cell phones (and by extension, MP3 Players) with sensitive mics will make recording everyday events a reality. Robert Scoble, in Jeremy brings up the typing vs. writing argument describes how easy it is grab an annotated recording of a meeting:
One other thing, why are you taking notes in meetings? Lately I've just been turning on OneNote, starting the audio recording feature, and taking a very brief outline. You know, just a few words about each section of the meeting to jog my memory for later.OneNote puts an audio icon next to each node in my outline as I write it. Later, all I do is double-click on the audio icon next to each line and OneNote takes me right to the relevant part of the audio.
If you aren't doing this in meetings you are wasting your time.
This kind of recording could work just as well for a lecture or a classroom.
This afternoon I had lunch with a friend who is a school teacher. We were talking about privacy. My friend said she expects classroom discussions will not be recorded without her permission. Unfortunately, I think she is living in the last few years when she can expect that.
The kind of annotated recording that Scoble talks about is too useful to ignore. A cross between an iPod and a PDA could easily record hundreds of hours of annotated meetings, lectures, classes, phone calls, and other conversations.
The annotations make the audio streams easily searchable (something that required brute force speech recognition until now). Think how useful, and powerful, it will be to be able to use your desktop/web search tool to get back the recording of the conversation where a decision was made. With annotated audio, existing desktop search tools could make that a reality almost immediately.
And the more audio the device can capture, the more useful it is. The device should be able to listen to phone calls (Bluetooth anyone?) as well as to meetings and lectures.
I don't think a Tablet with One Note is the ultimate device for this. But I think it is what we have now and it dramatically demonstrates the potential of annotated audio.
It may require the mythical "convergence device" to make this capacity commonplace. You need the audio and wireless capabilities of a cell phone, the annotation capabilities of a PDA, and the storage capacity of a hard drive MP3 Player to make it all work seamlessly.
I would love to do this with a next generation Sidekick that included a hard drive! Are you listening Danger?
Posted by georgegmacdonald at November 20, 2004 02:27 PM