Those of us who use our tablet and / or mobile to work are familiar with certain applications that allow take notes easily and effectively. Currently there are two that clearly outperform the rest. They are, of course, Google Keep y Evernote. The first stands out for its simplicity and the second for the vast amount of possibilities it offers. Today we explain how to take advantage of an option that you may not know of both.
The progressive advancement of speech recognition systems, personal assistants such as Now, Siri or Cortana, or even the proliferation of smart watches, can be taken as symptoms that little by little the methods of entering tactile data on our mobile devices will be replaced by voice commands. However, something as simple as take notes talking to our tablet or smartphone is not something too widespread, perhaps because we forget that such a possibility exists.
Either for an idea that suddenly comes to mind and that we want to have on hand to develop later, to perform a brainstorming or even for reminders, our tablet or smartphone can become an exceptional resource.
Google Keep, the optimal service?
When it was presented in society, it seemed very complicated that Keep could deal with an app like Evernote, so sophisticated and powerful, and yet in many ways it has succeeded: Google's Notes app is extremely simple and showy. Therein lies its great potential.
The Keep widget has 4 options, enough to create any type of annotation. The third of them is represented by a microphone and it will allow us to record voice notes, which at the same time will be automatically transcribed by the software, saving both formats (text and audio) in the same entry.
Evernote, top of the class
Evernote falls short of Keep's immediacy in this regard. Even so, it is still one of the better alternatives in any of the terrain that it tries to cover. The fundamental problem is that when clicking on the voice recording icon, we do not launch the recorder directly, but we must go through the app before. Nor will we have transcription and audio in the same note, something that can save us work later.
What is interesting about Evernote then? Well, the service goes far beyond from the simple task of taking notes. You can take notes and save them in notebooks along with other works, articles captured from the network, videos, photos, etc. to have all the material together, well organized and synchronized on very different supports.
Sony Easy Voice Recorder and Audio Recorder
As for specific functionalities for taking voice notes, probably EasyVoiceRecorder is the most advanced, simply because of the functionality of its widget, highly customizable. If we are avid voice capturers, from the starting screen we can start the recording, pause it, resume it and finish it; all without waiting for the app to load.
Still, there are a couple of drawbacks. The first is that Easy Voice Recorder has a design more like Ice Cream Sandwich than Lollipop; the second, that the free version only records in mono. To get stereo recording, we must get the paid variant.
Audio Recorder makes up for the shortcomings of Easy Voice. Its interface is much more powerful in aesthetic terms and records quality stereo (with the signature of Sony Mobile) for free, however, no widgets are available. One and the other complement each other and combining the virtues of both we would probably have the application perfect. Too bad we have to choose.