Taking Notes Across the Generations

YESTERDAY a visitor from the Philippines landed on my website insideview.ie to read how my family wrote and saved ideas. I started thinking that I no longer have to actually write anything. I can just talk about things and my blog will write itself.

by Bernie Goldbach talking to Surface Book in Clonmel

YESTERDAY a visitor from the Philippines landed on my website insideview.ie to read how my family wrote and saved ideas. I started thinking that I no longer have to actually write anything. I can just talk about things and my blog will write itself.

I can talk to my Surface Books' screen and it will create text from speech. This has digitally changed the way I work.

The point of the post that I was reviewing on my website is that a generation two generations ago, my grandfather used paper notes with little circles and tick marks. And then one generation ago my dad had a crumpled spiral notebook that he kept  in his pocket. Thirty years ago I started carrying a laptop along with a Moleskine. Twenty years ago I started using a mobile phone to create blog posts. And now I'm just talking to a computer and it's writing this blog post.

In three generations, my family has transitioned from paper cards and little notebooks to mobile phones to create and share information.

Today, I just have to talk and Otter.ai ensures I can easily share.

The technology that makes this work is a simple user experience. I use a Surface Book from Microsoft to talk into. The mics are really good. I record directly into Otter with the on-board laptop mics and Otter produces the content that I can simply copy and paste it into my blog. I'm sure the share option that otter has will probably allow me to post directly to my website in the future.

Interesting times ahead.

Otter reduced this short post into a summary of the 10 most used words:

website
generation
talk
mobile phone
spiral notebook
otter
crumpled
copy
mic
technological

[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business on the Clonmel Digital Campus. He's still looking for a simple way for his car to read his email summaries. That's probably a job for Microsoft Copilot.]