Dictation on your PocketPC
Looking for a way to make the most of your fancy new multimedia capable PocketPC? Most people have figured out that you can record short voice notes on the device - but how about using it for full fledged dictation? The biggest block to doing this is the lack of a Pause control while dictating...and when you resume recording, the PocketPC creates a whole new sound file. This limits the usefulness for dictation - who wants to send a whole bunch of separate sound clips to a secretary, with instructions on how to put them together?
Pocket Word Documents
Pocket Word, which comes standard on all PocketPCs, has
some neat features that take full advantage of the multimedia capabilities of
the PocketPC.
There are 4 modes of entering data into Pocket Word - most
users will have seen these options before under the View menu. But not
many realise how you can use all these modes in the same document - this means
that you can use your PocketPC as an intelligent Dictaphone.
First create a new document as usual. Templates can be very helpful for this -- see Using Templates in Pocket Word page.
Usually, you will start off in View | Typing mode, even if you are using something like Transcriber or Calligrapher for handwriting recognition.
You can use View | Writing if you wish and then Tools | Recognize to translate a batch of written text but most users find this batch mode clunky to use.
Once you have entered a few details to describe the
contents or purpose of the document, you can flip to dictation mode with View
| Recording. Click the red button to start recording. Click the black square
to stop.
As mentioned above, there is no Pause control. Simply stop
then start a new recording - they will all be contained within the same
document.
- note No Pause
You can now annotate the sound clips with helpful comments
eg spelling of unusual words.
You can easily change the order of the Recordings - they
can be moved around like any other text item, using Cut & Paste.
Diagrams
You can also scribble on your document. This can be very
useful for things like anatomical diagrams.
.. 
Use View | Drawing to do this.
You can even make colour drawings - you're only limited by
your penmanship.
One quirk I have noted - the easiest way to continue with
text below a drawing is to use View | Writing to insert something brief
below the drawing. You can then flip back to View | Typing and continue
down from there.
Sending to the Desktop
Use ActiveSync, as you would for any other file, to
copy your document over to the desktop. See the page
on File Transfer.
You can either use the Explorer that comes with ActiveSync,
or you can place the document in the Synchronised Files folder (if you have that
option selected as part of your ActiveSync).
Working with the Document on the Desktop
Once you have the document, simply open it using MS Word.
The text, sound clips and diagrams all are translated so that Word can work with
them. Simply double-click on a loudspeaker icon to hear the sound clip.
If you need to do more detailed work, for example with larger sections of
dictation, then right-click on the loudspeaker icon and choose Open or
Edit. You can now pause part way through a recording, replay sections of a large
sound clip etc.
If you plan to email your Pocket Word dictation to your staff, it is often helpful to give them some pointers on how to use document. We have constructed a simple MS Outlook email template that you can use, which outlines how to work with these dictated notes. This email template will work with Outlook 2000 or later. Simply double-click on the template on your desktop to launch Outlook email, with the instructions included. Edit to taste, add a soupcon of humour, throw in your attached Pocket Word document and send it off.
Fine Tuning
While the default settings for sound quality are not bad, if you plan to do a lot of this, it is worth experimenting with the sound quality settings. See the documents Sound Quality and File Sizes page and Sound quality testing.doc for more information on this. (This last document is quite large at 1.5MB - it has sound clips recorded at various quality settings - you can download this and listen to the quality of the recordings and compare for yourself.)
Try various settings and confer with your staff as
to which suits you best.