Philips DVT2810 Voicetracer Digital (Win Version)

The day after my VoiceTracer arrived, I re-injured my back. This recorder has been a life saver. Between arthritis in my hands that made it hard to type, and a bad back that makes it hard to sit up, I was going to get behind in writing my novel for a writing challenge that was important to me. But this recorder made it so easy for me to lie in bed and dictate, then plug it in a couple times a day to transcribe my notes and paste them in to my document. I went from barely sitting and typing 1200-1500 words a day to 5000-6000 words in just a few hours, and still had time to rest and recover. Love it.(My only con was the poor instructions, especially how to charge it for the first time. There were no words, just some unhelpful pictures that didn't make much sense. I finally went online and downloaded the User Manual so I could take advantage of all the features. There should be a written link in the instruction to get the User Manual, I had to search for about 30 minutes.)

For the price, this is a very good unit (the Dragon Naturally Speaking program that comes with the unit usually costs more than this machine). Works OK for transcribing direct dictation to text but it does not work well with transcribing a call on speaker phone (all parties knew the call was being recorded). The instructions a minimal so initial set up takes a while.

Why does every Voice recorder on the market always have to be made for a PC platform. The software for Transcribing on the Mac Platform is far and few and when you find one that might work it is difficult to use and then it does not do what you expect. On the amazon page for this product it did not say it would only work with a PC and the Nuance Dragon version for only PCs. That is very bad form. This product gets a 1 rating. It is not worth the money or the time to figure it out. The Instructions are microscopic and incomplete.Do not buy this. It will give you nothing but grief.

Handy litte tool to use especially for meetings or school lectures

This recorder comes with the Recorder Edition of Dragon. Apparently it's unsupported by "Nuance" the company who own Dragon. This is troubling, but for my purposes, not a deal breaker. The Dragon software will not transcribe MP3 files, so you'll have to set the recorder to create .WAV files. There are only two choices, MP3 and WAV, but the recorder calls them something else. Experiment until you get .WAV output and Dragon can transcribe those. The seller should know this and post it. That's why I gave 3 stars. Dragon does a reasonable job of the transcription. If you want to, you can learn how to inject things like periods, quotes, commas, etc... If not, just edit after the transcription. Overall I am happy with the product after I did the legwork to get the transcription working. The recorder is super simple to operate, but the instructions are severely lacking. Again, play with using the recorder until you are comfortable with how to operate it and change settings. None of the menus or navigation are intuitive, but just keep pressing until you h=get the hang of it. The voice clarity of the recording is good, and there are some options that can be useful like slowing down playback if you can't understand what is being said. I think the price is a little high but part of that is probably the dragon software. I think "Nuance" needs to honor their agreement with the seller of this recorder and offer updates and customer support for Dragon. Otherwise, the software is okay.

Beyond the fact that I'm excited about this device and its capabilities- And its meaningful to me. This seller has the most amazing customer service!!! What could have been a big mess (and it was partly my confusion!) was taken care of, completely handled, and this was all so incredibly fast and easy. They are so nice too! When you feel and are treated like a #1 priority- wow- that just tells you something! Thank you!!

I like the quality of the sound. It is actually quite good. The Dragon software is just plain horrible. It makes up words, even after you train it. A lot of its output was total gibberish.The worse came when I installed an older version of Microsoft Visual Studio, version 6.0. I had to check out a program I developed years ago.It caused dragon to fail, statimg it was incompatible with the version of pdm.dll installed. The 'fix' was to rename that dll so dragon couldn't find it. Of course, it also caused Visual Stupido to fail. That's a bogus fix. If you know your program needs specific versions of a particular dll, you copy that dll to a directory local to your application or you link it in statically.This stuff is pure amateur hour, just from that perspective! I bought this thing because it stated it could do transcription. I cannot.I feel this product is a total rip off by Philips. Don't buy it. I'm highly suspect of Philips product from now on.

Funciona