Original Reddit post

I occasionally do interviews for a small publication and a few freelance pieces. Nothing super formal, but enough that I need recordings I can actually work from later. The tricky part is that a lot of interviews happen in less-than-ideal places — cafés, conference halls, events, sometimes even outdoors. For a long time I just used my phone recorder. It works, but once background noise kicks in the transcript tools start falling apart. Recently I started experimenting with a couple dedicated recorders like Plaud, and also testing TicNote since it automatically generates transcripts and summaries. What I noticed after a few interviews: Phones are fine when the environment is quiet, but once there’s crowd noise the transcripts get messy pretty quickly. Plaud’s hardware actually captures audio really well. For noisy environments the raw recording quality is noticeably better than a phone. TicNote felt interesting because the transcript and summaries were already structured enough that I could start drafting notes from them. So depending on the situation I ended up using them slightly differently. Another thing I didn’t expect: I’ve also started using them for podcasts. I listen to a lot of long industry podcasts while commuting, and sometimes there are good quotes or insights I want to revisit later. Plaud works well if I just want to save the audio. TicNote is surprisingly useful here because it turns a long episode into a structured summary, which makes it easier to skim later when I forget what was discussed. Anyway, curious what other journalists or interview-heavy people are using now. Are people mostly sticking with phones, or moving to dedicated recorders? submitted by /u/breadislifeee

Originally posted by u/breadislifeee on r/ArtificialInteligence