527: Dictation and Text Capture

This was a great episode for me as getting text into documents has always frustrated me because, well, I don’t type well! I’ve started dictating and that has been great to get lots of words onto the page that I am happy to go back and tidy up. I will try and be more effective as time goes on.

Question to the group on touch typing.

When I’m back at work (soon, hopefully) dictating may not be the way to go in an open office. Anyone have a “best in class” typing tutor they’d recommend. Going to spend my down time learning new skills.

Thank you

Great episode.

+1 for Markdown-focussed episode.

Bonus points if you can get John Gruber as a guest :smile:.

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Maybe the option to easily create or assign abbreviations in LaunchBar was something that wasn’t equally obvious to me with Alfred…?
All in all LaunchBar does have some aspects I don’t like. I’m not sure if it’s handling indexing properly. And even though there is an option for Spotlight search, it doesn’t show me previews of search results. If it did I could turn off Spotlight and not have that put a burden on my computer as well.

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In terms of test replacement, is there a way to have multiple lines in the system iOS text replacement? I’d love to have multiple line replacements from the system tool (e.g., email signature) without needing to use a third party keyboard.

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Sadly, no. And email signatures are where I’d probably use it the most since Mail doesn’t have TextExpander support.

It’s possible to use multi-line text replacements on Mac, iPhone, and iPad, though you would need to use a Mac to create these text replacements.

On the Mac:

  1. Open System Preferences. Click on the “Keyboard” pane then click on the “Text” tab.
  2. Click the “+” button to add a new text replacement.
  3. Enter the shortcut text in the Replace column.
  4. Paste some multi-line/multi-paragraph text into the With column.

This text replacement syncs across all of your device using iCloud.

I hope this helps!

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iOS has per-email account signatures now. Would that work for what you want to do?

I love Gruber, but I think I’d actually like to hear from someone new on markdown—maybe Fletcher Penney!

The reason: Gruber’s take on markdown is pretty narrow. I’d bet most of us are actually using the expanded tool sets available via extensions like Fletcher’s multimarkdown, and I’d be curious about the way these tools are growing (and how they relate to other tools like Pandoc).

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I don’t want the signature in every email.

I can’t tell you what a mixture of anger and happiness I’m feeling. Every year, when a new version of iOS comes out, I try this on my phone or iPad and it always fails. It never occured to me that doing the same damned thing on the Mac would work and go on to work on iOS.

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It’s far from ideal, but certainly better than nothing. Hopefully iOS/iPadOS 14 will bring feature parity with the Mac and for Text Replacement. Even better, I’d love to see support for rich text across all platforms. Time will tell. :crossed_fingers:

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You can even type text with multiple lines in the text replacement field separating them with Alt-Return on the Mac. It’s kind of masochistic, though.
I haven’t tried this on iOS, but now with all the external keyboard support it might work as well.

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Hello Gang,

Longtime listener who finally decided to join the conversation. Great episode!

My question is if anyone can recommend the best way to capture small bits of text from paper book? I often read paper books and want to capture a great sentence or paragraph. I saw one Bluetooth scanning pen that looks like a highlighter. That is what I’m thinking would be great, but reviews are very mixed on the accuracy.

I’ve also tried just dictating it, but awkward when reading in a quiet place.

I’m sure others have the same need. Any recommendations for how to capture a couple lines or a paragraph from a book?

Thanks!

I use this brilliant product for the very situation you describe when I’m reading a book on the train. I’ve had it for a while and I think I bought the $9.99 version. Love it! There’s companion Mac version in SetApp.

Thanks, that looks like a very cool App! Similar to TextGrabber by Abby, which is also a $10/yr subscription, but I think I like the way this one works a bit better.

Does anyone have any other contenders?

Prizmo sure seems pretty nice!

I had to smile during the MPU episode when David mentioned Walter Cronkite. I once remember a bio about Mr. Cronkite where I read that he trained himself to speak at a steady 120 WPM as that was the pace where studies showed that it was the most believable pace. I actually had a customer facing person I had hired who was excellent except he talked way to fast in front of customers. I pointed him to some videos on YouTube of Mr. Cronkite and had him watch them and practice. I can see where it would be useful for dictation as well.

FYI although Cronkite was claimed to have trained himself to speak as 124 words per minute (I’ve seen that repeated many times on many sites including Wikipedia) as far as I can tell it seems to point back to an unsupported assertion by a Communications professor at Wichita State in 2007, subsequently repeated by many others, and then appeared as fact in Cronkite obituaries in 2009.

I

Meh.
20 characters blah blah blah

When I travel (or did travel, in the past), I referred to Americans,like myself, as “language murderers.” But then I realized everybody does it!

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Can you share the shortcuts for turning voice control on and off.