EF Talk Scriber 24.08

Overview

EF Talk Scriber is a text editor and a transcriber application. When someone wants to write up a transcript of an audio recording like a podcast, seminar, classroom session, or radio program, they have trouble typing and also accessing an audio player at the same time. The window doesn't always stay open for the audio player and stay on top of the editor. Controls between the text editor and the player can sometimes conflict. It can be an unproductive and frustrating mess.

With EF Talk Scriber, this frustration is mostly done away with. An audio player is built into the bottom of the editing screen. The player can access WAV, FLAC, OGG/Vorbis and MP3 audio files. The player can play, pause, stop and also go forward or back.

The editor supports Unicode, word wrap, can add the current date and time into a document, and perform search, find next and replace functions on the existing text. The font, colors and other configurations can be altered to suit the transcriber, plus these settings can be backed up and restored in other versions on other computers too.

There is no spell checker or grammar checker from the looks of the application and no highlighting when a word is typed incorrectly in English. So any transcription would need to be copied into Word or some other word processor in order to check it for spelling and grammar errors. The package also defaults to loading plain text files and failed to load Word documents. Therefore, any transcribed document would need to be converted into a more usable format than plain text before distribution. This adds a couple of extra hurdles that could have been handled within the app if it only had more features.

Installation

The installation went without incident. No additional software was added.

Interface

The interface is a series of menus, text editing controls at the top of the interface, and some audio playback controls in the audio player at the bottom of the window.

The interface lacks any flare.

Pros

• Plain text transcribing of audio content
• Adequate transcribing tool only
• Audio player with limited playback controls at the bottom of the application window

Cons

• No ability to add emphasis to comments with italics or bold face text.
• Cannot access Word documents
• No spell checker
• Lacks refinement in jump back or forward controls to enable the user jump back in useful increments like is possible with a podcast player
• Frequent reminder nag screen which can lock the application when the window sits behind the application window and cannot be reached.

Conclusion

EF Talk Scriber is a basic transcriber application that can play audio recordings within the application and let the user write down what was said. Lacks rich editing features to add emphasis, a spell checker and Word document support.