For the first time in my life it feels like we are moving away from physically interacting with products and most obviously the smartphone.

I recently played around with an app called Whisperflow which surprised me by its sheer accuracy which was beyond anything I’d seen before. It wasn’t just the accuracy, it was the formatting, the punctuation and the way the resultant transcript was presented.

AI was used in this, of course and it really was a hugely positive experience.

The main negative was the plus £150 a year subscription charge which kind of ruled it out for me.

So I thought I would try something called the SoundCore Work, which was on offer from Amazon. I had looked at other options from Plaud and many other devices, but they were all costing well over 100 pounds.

When I saw this one for £79 I thought it might be time to give it a go.

In the box you get this extremely small, what could only be described as a microphone that has a magnetic clip behind it that you can use to attach to a t-shirt or to a front pocket.

You get a neck strap which is adjustable so you can wear this as a necklace and you also get quite a smart looking charging dock which you can attach to the back of your iPhone. One nice touch is that there is a magnetic ring also included if you do not have MagSafe capability on your phone so you literally can take it anywhere.

In comparison to some of the other devices, however, it doesn’t do the direct call recording that is enabled on other devices by simply attaching the recorder to your phone. You can still use the speakerphone and it will record both sides of the call and then transcribe them as you need with each speaker separated.

On this point, this is the only downside I’ve found of this particular product because it’s very much aimed at meeting notes. It separates speakers out quite cleverly and if you are in a lot of meetings I could see this being exceptionally useful.

You will have the original voice recording, a transcription and you can ask for an AI summary as well so there’s no reason why you would forget anything.

I can also see this being useful on particular phone calls and for my wife in meetings as well which gives this device an even better value level.

I wanted, however, to see how well it works for writing articles because my ability to stare at a screen and type for long periods is limited these days due to illness. And also if I can successfully transcribe an article through my voice alone and not have to do too much work afterwards. I will then be able to put more on this site for example.

It does work well. It’s extremely accurate and the accuracy of the transcription is superb. However, one big problem is that each sentence you speak is separated by speaker, which is a bit annoying if I’m the only person talking. You will see from one of the screenshots in this article that it says speaker0, speaker0, speaker0 and there’s no need for that because I’m literally just transcribing one block of speech.

It isn’t too difficult to get out of that though. You can simply copy all of the text and put it in an online service which will remove those speaker tags and any timestamps, but it feels slightly less private having to do that when you’re putting it into a site online and they’re seeing everything you say.

It’s not something I would do for personal meetings or personal calls, but it’s just something that sticks in the back of my mind that I have to follow an extra step to make the text easy to edit for the site. It also means that a lot of the text is broken up continually because there will be gaps. I’m naturally thinking when I speak and so there will be gaps and so there’s a bit of extra editing required at the end of it.

What I would say though is that overall the experience is extremely positive and although you only get 300 minutes of transcription for free per month I would suspect that that’s more than enough for most people. Crucially, you get to keep the voice recordings regardless and you can share both the transcriptions and the recordings to any other app.

I would suggest if you really need to transcribe, only transcribe for the voice recordings that need it. For any others, if it’s phone calls or meetings, do away with the transcription if you’re nearing your limit, but at least you have the option, which to me makes this pretty decent value for money under £80.

So far battery life has been good, recording quality has been decent and I really like the ability to highlight particular bits of text by a simple double tap.

So yeah, overall I’m very impressed, mostly impressed with the accuracy of the transcription and the ability to pick up voices in lots of different areas.

I would just like a little more flexibility in being able to simply speak, take all of the text you’ve spoken, have it in one document without all the tags added, and I’m hoping that will be added in the future.

Categories: Product Reviews