Philips LFH0617/00 ClearVoice Speech to Text Digital Recorder

The voice recorder is simple to use, and has a relatively large 1GB capacity. Copying off recording files is simplicity itself, as you can just connect it as an external drive to your PC. No messing about with file conversion programs as with my old Sony VR. It also allows you to record in various levels of clarity, but to be honest, the highest should be yout choice if you plan on having it converted to text later. The mic is sensitive enough to record business meetings, but you'll need to have people reasonably close for them to be properly distinguishable. I didn't notice much difference with the optional 'clarity' setting.

Once you have the recordings, you can optionally pass them into Dragon and have it attempt to convert voice into text. Don't expect miracles here. It's only going to be wholly successful in interpreting clearly recorded memos by a single person speaking close to the microphone and without a large amount of background noise, and it will make the odd mistake. You can improve its ability to understand by going through a voice learning process. This will ensure you're more successful. However, assume that you're going to have to go through afterwards and correct the odd few words.

Overall, this is a good value combo, and if you're in the market for dictation software and a recorder together, you could do a lot worse than choose this pairing.

This little recorder comes very well packaged and contains the recorder, battery, very short usb cable and a dvd.Initially you put the battery in the recorder, attach the recorder to your pc using the usb cable and almost immediately you will get the instruction manual for the recorder.However, the instructions for transferring any recording to text are contained on the dvd.Unplug the recorder from your pc and insert the disc into your pc.

Once you have followed the instructions on the disc it takes about half an hour or so to transfer various files and initialise etc, you are then presented with a setup wizard.This is the most important part.You are presented with a User box and you click on New.You are then presented with a New User Wizard with drop down menus for language,accent and dictation source.I chose UK english, general accent and (most importantly)digital recorder using sound files.There is a brief pause whilst it creates a vocabulary and then you're back to the wizard, click next and then choose from the limited list a selection of text (in very small print), which you must read and record for 15 minutes.Once you've done that you plug the recorder back into your pc and the wizard will ask you to choose a file to transcribe.My advice is to click on Browse and then click on Recent Places and then double click on A and what you've just recorded should be obvious (if only that when the cursor hovers over it you get the date and time).Click on open and you go back to the wizard and click next.Assuming you've recorded at least 15 minutes the text is then verified and if it's correct you click next again and then click start adapting and sit back and watch as your dictation is rendered thus:

"Here is my review of the Philips LSH0617/00 her voice speech she X Digital recorder adversely you aren't Hank the recorder it self which is actually more difficult than it sounds as Philips packaging is extremely secure however one should manage that you just detach the USB lead from the recorder to your computer and this will bring up and it's Philips instruction manual which will give you details of all the functions of the recorder this is all pretty much straightforward fur anyone who's ever use a tape recorder"

Not quite what I said.

I have actually set this up 3 times now.Each time as a new user.The first time I read from Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, which rendered Alice as Alison, child as chart and many other "hilarious" mistakes.The second time I read from an Arthur C Clarke novel,3001,which was more accurate although things like "Dave, he said" did come out Davey said. and the third time I just spoke into it as if dictating, this ended up being largely unintelligable, thus;

"straightforward from now and it does all day quite a bit of time initially but when she got the hang of it you can do it quite quickly although some of the car functions that dance to take and can take a long time honestly dependent on my how much you've dictated I doesn't marbled to see it all when you've reattached dual recorder to the computer you then see all your speech garden translated text unfortunately it is not that accurate certainly to begin with arms round the eternity of this of text to read from our" .

However, you can correct mistakes and save the corrections, which although time consuming, should, over time, enable the whole thing to be much more accurate.You can also instruct it to insert capitals,line breaks,paragraphs,etc.

I've given it 3 stars because,basically, it is fairly straightforward, but you will need to devote several hours to it to ensure that in the long run what you dictate is accurate.Also,I found the screen quite difficult to see and I think it would be a lot better if it was backlit, and finally the internal speaker is poor and the volume very low even on maximum and you would really struggle to hear it in a noisy environment,although the sound is fine with earbuds or headphones and through the pc's media player.Great idea,great technology, but so far a bit disappointing.

This is a very nice digital voice recorder and the included Dragon Naturally Speaking software is absolutely superb, I have used text to speech solutions before and already had the latest version of Dragon installed and trained on my PC. The recorder is a perfect small device which is capable of picking up all the conversations during meetings, the built in 1GB of memory is more than sufficient for most uses and will store ~35hours of recording in High quality mode. Transferring the recordings is as simple as using the included USB cable to connect the device to your PC and dragging the files from your device to the PC using the file explorer.

The voice to text conversion is the most useful feature of this solution and works a treat so long as the software has been through the 'learning process' which takes about 2hours over the course of several days, but is defiantly worth the time. When using it to transcribe meetings it will not be so accurate and can have some severe problems if more than one person is talking at the same time. I would recommend using an external microphone if this is going to be the main use for the device as it will be able to be pace more centrally and will have better pickup than the built in mic.