During the 1998 Winter Consumers Electronic Show in Las Vegas, Rick Smith and I became acquainted with some new voice capture technologies that we felt could be very useful to individuals and companies and was long overdue to the marketplace. One of these innovative products is being launched by Voice It Worldwide, Inc. a company located in Fort Collins, Colorado that designs, develops and markets personal consumer electronic products. It's products allow people to efficiently verbalize reminders and messages for themselves and others, without the need of paper and pencil.

During 1998, the Voice It VR-2000, a digital recorder, was introduced and has the ability to capture up to 50 minutes of voice on flash memory. This recording can then be transferred to a personal computer as a highly compressed digital voice file. This innovative product is designed to be a direct replacement for micro-cassette tape recorders. It promises long term reliability, ease of use, message editing with both delete AND insert, along with PC data transfer capability.

Voice It utilizes a broad range of silicon chip technology including digital analog storage devices, flash memory and digital voice compression ICs (integrated circuits). These technologies are combined with proprietary software which enables the company and their products to stay on the cutting edge of new voice technology products. With this technology, I was able to record verbal information and transfer it to a PC, where I stored it on the hard drive. Later I could transcribe, organize, label or even appended this file to a word processing file and e-mail it to a colleague. I could even export it back to the Voice It hand held recorder. Transferring the data back and forth was an easy, straightforward process, with no installation problems.

When I used this product on a recent trip, I showed it to executives, workers and others to get their reactions. Most were impressed by its size and capabilities, along with a "gee whiz" reaction to how easy the technology was to use. As I keep saying, usability is a key consumer issue. I strongly feel those companies that deliver a product that is usable, reliable and has a good price/performance ratio, will be a winner. Voice It is on that track. Additionally, the ability to have voice to text capability was frequently mentioned, but was not yet available on this unit. It weighs a mere 3.5 ounces, and is only 4.75x2.25x1 inches in size. It has a suggested list price of $299.99.

Additionally, recent agreements with Dragon Systems, IBM, AVRI and others, make me think that even more useful Voice It product developments are very near, including full voice to text capability.

The VR-2000 is recommended for the business traveler, busy executive or anyone needing to take quick, efficient notes and messages with a compact and well designed unit.

Pros
Compact and lightweight
Solid state design
Insert function

Cons
Cost
No speech to text (yet)

Copyright © 1998 Jim Bennett All rights reserved.