Audio transcription disengages

Issues
1

Since Drafts 30, audio dictation has been a really valuable addition and I have been getting on well with it both on Mac and iOS.

My present issue is on Mac – I am limited to 10.15.7 on an older MacBook Pro – with the Apple text recognition kit installed which uses ‘fn-fn’ to initiate recording. I am finding in Drafts that recording starts and then kicks out unpredictably.

  • Not the Apple 30 second limit I get on my iPhone 8
  • Often after a few seconds

So I have to watch the screen and pump the function key to keep it going.

It’s not a problem because I can record/transcribe into Drafts iOS which works remarkably well and gets around the 30 second limit in an acceptable way.

But it is ‘unexpected behaviour’ and there might be some wisdom on what is causing the hiccup, and how to overcome it. Or it could be a bug…

Audio transcription has become for me one of the strongest features in Drafts – experience with other apps has been patchy, to say the least – and it is a great help to my particular workflow – than you, Greg!

–Ian Greig

2

System dictation works fine and doesn’t kick out in other applications on this system? That dictation is not something implemented by apps, but is all at the system level…but it certainly could be that something going on it Drafts is interfering with it on older systems.

3

That was my thought as a humble user… so strange that this should show up in Drafts. I’ll continue to test and see if I can refine (or refute) the question.

4

There is also something going on with the ‘New Paragraph’ command… like it doesn’t work and then it puts in several and kicks out the dictation.

But I have dictated a longer piece without any punctuation commands and it did get tired after a while and kicked out.

–Ian Greig