When Speed Matters, Pick the Method that’s Fast
What’s the quickest way to write something, when you don’t have a keyboard or even a pen and paper?
A dictation app.
I’ve used several dictation apps and Otter, by far, is my favorite.
Why I Love Otter for Dictation
First I liked it for the price. It’s for free for 600 minutes a month.
It turns out to be about 20 minutes a day, so 600 minutes is plenty for most folks. If you need more than that, Otter is definitely worth the price of $8.33 a month.
With the paid premium version, you get 6000 minutes a month. Otter perks that I like are that you can upload podcasts or videos and get transcription files. It also integrates well with Dropbox.
How I use Otter Daily
I used otter a lot this past November when I was doing the National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. I was able to dictate in my car, or just about anywhere that I had a couple of minutes to get some ideas down.
If you happen to be offline, you can still record and Otter will do the work whenever it gets a connection to the cloud. Otter makes an audio recording. And then it uploads that to the server.
If you are online the whole time you are speaking, it will upload as you speak. This way, transcription is usually pretty instantaneous.
Is Otter All I Use for Transcribing and Dictating?
Don’t get me wrong. I still use the built-in dictation for iOS, when I just need something quick. Maybe I need to just jot out a quick text message, or I need Siri to write something out for me quickly in Evernote.
Siri is always good for the less than one-minute quick stuff.
But if you need to do an extended dictation that’s more than a minute long, and you want it to self punctuate, then Otter is for you.
So check out Otter.ai and start making content more quickly. Otter’s a great tool you will reach for often in your content-making tool kit.
And yes, I dictated this whole post by using Otter!