A pen with a USB port and microphone is proving a godsend to scribes and students
JOURNALISTS ARE a cynical bunch, and, with the exception of the gadget-obsessed technology press, joyously Luddite to boot. So I was surprised the other week to watch hardened war and foreign correspondents cooing like doves at what seemed to be, frankly, a €200 biro with a USB port.
It’s called a Livescribe pen, and I’m being unfair. The cheapest of the pens retails for about $100 in the US, though I cant find anywhere that sells it cheaper than €140 in Europe. And I have to say, it packs quite a lot of functionality into something that looks like a fancier version of those chunky multi-colour ballpoint pens.
Essentially, what the Livescribe does, out of the box, is answer the dreams of reporters who have to take interviews (and students taking lecture-notes, transcribers, and a few other key jobs). It has a microphone, and a sensor near the pen tip that can work out where on a piece of paper you’re writing. It can record pages of writing, and upload your scrawls as images to your computer.
On the computer, they stay as scrawls. It can’t transcribe your handwriting into real word-processor friendly text (well, not entirely – as we’ll see), but that’s not what it’s designed to do. Instead, if you switch it to record sound, it will record what you were hearing, and match it to what you were writing.
If this doesn’t sound particularly earth shattering, picture this. I’m in the middle of an hour-long interview with the chief executive of a major company. During that time, he says maybe three interesting things (let’s assume that he’s a particularly fascinating boss). Usually, such quotes would be buried in an hour of audio recording, which I’d have to either transcribe or spend my time laboriously leaping around with an audio recorder.
With this pen, I just set it recording, and write my notes as normal. When I go back to my notes, if I want to hear exactly what our illustrious business leader was saying when I scribbled “Did he just admit to defrauding Goldman Sachs?!” all I have to do is tap my Livescribe pen on that particular part of the scrawl. The pen instantly knows, and can replay, what I was hearing when I wrote that interjection.
It’s hard to convey just what a godsend such a device is to a reporter or note taker who has to plough through hours of wandering interviews every week.
But my pack of hardy correspondents spotted it, and were happy to jump through all the USB and software installation hoops to get it to work.
Such a device might be useful to you, too. But for me, I’m more interested in the survivability of such a gadget in the modern technology world. Livescribe works on Mac and Windows, but it’s not tightly integrated into either ecosystem. It does one thing well, but there’s lots of evidence that the manufacturers dream of more widespread uses. The pen itself is a pretty powerful computer, with over a gigabyte of RAM. That means that it can store hundreds of hours of audio or pages, but it also means it could be programmed to do more than just match scribble to babble.
Play with the pen for a while (yes, reader, I bought one) and you see traces of these other possibilities. There’s a “piano” demo application on the phone, where you draw you own pen piano keyboard, then pluck out tunes on it. A simple translator is included, which does recognise a limited amount of text. On the PC side, a third party offers a handwriting to text utility. It’s no better than you’d expect (it’s not going to penetrate my doctor’s levels of illegibility on prescriptions), but might be useful for some. And there’s an app store and developer guides for other coders to build their own pen-hosted devices.
Will they? Livescribe reminds me of Palm, a company whose product, the first usable portable organising device, was fantastic at what it did. But once you’ve done that, what do you do next? A great company that knows its place never loses its focus. Others, haunted by their venture capital investors and their own ambitions, want to take over the world.
Palm stumbled partly because it ceased to make a coherent, simple product. But it’s unfair to Palm’s executives to blame that decision on greed or an ignorance about their strengths. Companies like Palm and Livescribe operate in an environment of rapid change, and much of that change is driven by much larger companies. Palm’s mistakes came as it sought to evade being king of a dying niche: the only small personal organiser company in a world of Nokia and Apple mobile devices.
Sometimes, a pen is just a pen. Livescribe already have a brilliant product. Their challenge now is to work out how to let everyone who’d want one, know that – and to find a niche so that when the real giants of technology, like Apple and Microsoft come looking, they decide to work with Livescribe, rather than just build their own €50 super pens.
