Transcription
Here's an amazing trick that's going to save you lots of time and help you remember anything. It's in the Notes app on your iPhone or your iPad or your Mac. So, you do need one of those.
And I've been using Apple Notes for years, by the way, but I keep getting blown away by all of the cool new stuff that it can do. And so, this feature used to be available only in the separate Voice Memos app, but is now available right inside Apple Notes. And it's absolutely amazing.
On my iPhone over here, I'm going to open up Apple Notes and I'm going to tap into this particular note which I've already given a title because it's about the filter replacement for my heating, ventilation, and air conditioning unit that I've got in my apartment. So, the other day the heating, ventilation, air conditioning unit just stopped working and I realized it's 'cause I had to replace the filter. You'd think that would be really easy, but actually it took me probably about 30 minutes to figure out how to do it and then to actually do it, which is just a lot of time. I'm going to have to do this again in a year or so. So, I just want to write down in this note how to do it so I save the time next year.
Now, what I can do inside this note, if I just tap into it, you see this bar appears at the bottom and there's a paperclip button. And I'm just going to tap that paperclip button. There's a lot of things I can do right here, but I'm going to tap "Record Audio." And now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to talk to my phone. Just make sure I hold it close to my mouth and explain how I replace the filter.
"When replacing the filter on the HVAC unit, first look at the top of the filter. It will say either one or two. Instead of one, just take the filter out, flip it very quickly. Put it back in. Use twice. The number two is already at the top. There is a new filter in there. And then it'll get going again."
This is going to save me so much time next year. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to tap "Done." You're going to see a bunch of cool stuff. There's this card now inside my note. It's titled "New Recording." We'll fix that in a minute. But it has a little preview. You can see right there it's audio. You can play it back. And there's a little summary of what I just said.
Now, if I tap on this card, though, I get to this screen right here. And you see that I can actually scroll through a transcript of what I just said. This is so amazing because obviously it's much faster to actually talk to my phone, explain what needs doing than to type this all in, especially on my phone, right? But there's way more cool stuff that we can do with this beyond just that.
So, first of all, at the top, we can tap "Summary," and that's just going to quickly summarize everything that we said. There's actually a pretty good, pretty good summary right here.
Now, there's way more cool stuff we can do. If you're in this screen right here, you can tap the ellipses at the top right. So, I'm just going to tap that. And first of all, I can rename this. So, I'll just say "Filter Replacement Instructions" just 'cause I like things to have clean names. But if I go into that ellipses menu, you can see, for example, that I can copy the transcript and I can then send it in an email. Let's say I need to send it to my partner so that they can use these instructions next year. I can tap "Find in Transcript" and search perhaps for the word "number."
But what I really like doing is tapping this button that says "Add Transcript to Note." If I do that, it actually takes the whole text of what I said and just pastes it in the notes. So, I can read it right here and manipulate it, which is just really, really convenient.
So, this is really great for capturing ideas when you're on the go. In fact, often when I'm just on a walk around my neighborhood, I'll have a really good idea, just something I want to share with someone or an insight that I had or something maybe that I want to write in an email and I'll just pull out my phone and rather than like stand awkwardly on the sidewalk and like try to type out a whole thing, I just open up "Record Audio" and I just talk to my phone and I'm done much more quickly and I can go back to whatever I was doing, enjoying the beautiful neighborhood I live in, right?
But there's so many good use cases for this. Also, a few months ago, I went to the dentist and he gave me some instructions about like a wisdom tooth I need to have pulled and stuff. And I just as soon as I stepped out of the dentist's office, just recorded that into a note and now I can refer back to that 'cause, hey, I'm not going to remember what the guy said. And I actually heard a really good example recently where someone said, "Hey, I sometimes have to go to the doctor's office with my elderly parent. This is such a great way for me to just record what the doctor says and then I can summarize it and share the whole thing or just the summary with my parent afterwards, you know, because they're forgetful." What a great use case, right?
One thing I want to do in this particular case, in addition to having the transcript, is I'm just going to go to the bottom of the note and I'm actually also just going to attach a photo. So, I'll choose the paperclip and then choose "Choose Photo or Video." And I just took a photo where I'm just pointing at the particular button that I need to press to get it to those settings and, you know, tell the unit that I refreshed the filter. I find that really helpful.
I'm also going to go in and actually start typing #home and that just adds a tag of "home" and that's really helpful because when I then go into the main screen of my Apple Notes, I can tap "home" and see all of the home notes that I've taken recently and really easily get back to this one.
By the way, if you've previously recorded something in the Voice Memos app and you'd like to get that into a note in the Notes app, that's really easy to do. Just open the Voice Memos app and grab the voice recording that you want to share. Just tap the ellipses and tap "Share." Then just choose the Notes app and you can save it to a new note, for example. Or if you tap in here, you can choose an existing note. For example, here's the HVAC filter note, but I'll choose a new note in this case. And just tap "Save."
Now, if I go back to Apple Notes, you're going to see a new note and it's going to have the audio recording attached. I can tap into it and it'll have a transcript as well. And you can actually share audio from any other app into the Notes app as well and it will transcribe it.
Here's a tip for doing this quickly when you're on the go. By the way, just unlock your phone and then long-press the Notes app icon and then tap "Record Audio." It'll jump right into recording audio inside a new note. You can tap the record button, record whatever you want to record, tap the pause button, tap "Done," and it'll be right there.
I want to show you another couple of cool things you can do with Apple Notes. But for that, let's switch over to the Mac. Apple Notes automatically syncs this note to the Mac. That's incredibly helpful. We've got the audio, we've got the text, we've got the image, we've got the tag that we assigned.
Now, what I like to do in a case like this is also include the PDF manual for the device that I was using right here. So, how are we going to do that? We're going to click this button right here, and we're just going to choose "Attach File." Now, it's in my downloads folder, which I'm going to sort by date added, and or group by date added. And then this is all the documents that I downloaded today 'cause I went and found it on the internet. Attach.
And now the PDF sits in the document right here. And I can actually just like swipe through the PDF like this. I know this is in Dutch. You probably have no idea what this says, but this is the instruction manual for the thing. Now, if you click the little arrow icon right here, you can actually go "View As" and make it small, medium, or large. Medium looks like this. It's just a little bit smaller. And if I do "View As," and do "Small," it's a lot smaller. And I actually find this one pretty nice for a note like this. You can actually do this for the image as well, by the way. Just right-click the image, go "View As," and make it "Small." And you have a much neater note.
Now, another really cool thing that I want to show you is an AI feature. So, this is totally optional. You don't have to use AI if you don't want to, but this can be pretty cool. What I can do is I can actually select this text and then I can press this button right here, which is the "Writing Tools" button. What I can say is "Convert this to a step-by-step list." There's a bunch more options here, by the way, right? I can proofread, I can rewrite, make this more friendly, professional, all kinds of things. But I can also just tell it to do something. So, I'm going to say "Convert this to a step-by-step list." And it's going to take a second and do that. There you go. Now, we have a very simple step-by-step list that I can follow next time. And I've just got a beautiful note. And in about a year's time when I need to replace this filter, I'll know exactly what to do. I won't have to start digging around through YouTube video comments anymore.
Now, if you're thinking, "Hey, this is great, but I use a Windows PC. I don't have a Mac. I do have an iPhone, but a Windows PC." You can still access these notes on your Windows PC. All you got to do is go over to iCloud.com/notes. Sign in with your Apple account and all that kind of stuff. And once you're signed in, you'll get to iCloud Notes and you can browse your notes just the same way that you can do it in the Notes app. So I can find the note right here and I'll see all the information here.
Now, does this have all of the features of the app on your iPhone on your Mac? No, it doesn't. But the audio is here and I can download it and play it if I want. The instructions are here, the PDF is here, and the image is here. So that's really helpful.
I should mention at this point that transcription is not available in all languages. So if you don't see a transcript, that might be why. Try it in English. And if that does work, then unfortunately your language is not supported yet. Also, recording the audio right here, it's not going to pick up different speakers. It's just going to all transcribe the audio, you know, as if one person said it. So, if you need to record, for example, a meeting between you and other people and you want to keep track of who's saying what, you might want to use a dedicated note-taking, like a meeting note-taking app for that. I like Fireflies.ai, for example.
You also just want to make sure you're on a recent iPhone, iPad, or a Mac, and that they're fully updated, and then you should see these features.
Now, if you found this just as cool as I find it, you can go ahead and download my free Apple Notes cheat sheet linked in the video description to discover a bunch more stuff that you can do with Apple Notes. And if you're like, "Hey, I would love to have a whole system for stuff like this to remember things that I need to do," you can enroll in my course, Productivity 101. I'll also link to that in the description of the video. It gets you set up with your own personal productivity system, which, hey, we're asked to do so much in this modern world. We all have so many responsibilities. Like, we need a personal productivity system to stay organized, get stuff done, just to survive. So, go check that out as well.
Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next video. Ciao.