7 May 2019 – 27 June 2019
What is it?
Snowball is an app I made for my phone that I use to verbally record my thoughts and keep a text transcription of them. While I like to listen back through the audio recordings themselves, the transcriptions allow me to easily search through them (like searching for song lyrics on google).
Why not use an existing app?
I like to think out loud. Talking helps me organize my ideas, and even the act of listening to the recordings helps me process my ideas. I also use a lot of words that can’t be transcribed in a standard speech-to-text program: nonsense words that help with descriptions, words in other languages, sounds for sound effects, etc. I don’t want these things to be lost by just having my phone convert what I say to text. This forces me to preserve the original audio, but you can’t search through an audio file!
I use the transcriptions for quick skimming of the recording’s contents and to search for terms in the recording. For example, if I wanted to find all recordings related to this app, I could search for ‘transcriber’ or ‘Snowball’ and get a list of those recordings. I can then listen to those audio files or read through their transcriptions.
What does it do?
- Records Audio (also supports pausing the recording if I need time to organize my thoughts)
- Automatically Transcribes Audio
- Stores text with the audio file
- Playback Controls
- Includes pause, stop, fast forward, rewind, skip forward, and skip back options
- Renames Audio File With First Few Words Of The Transcription