Our Guest Blogger this week is Daniel Gold - productivity author, consultant and presenter. Daniel works with individuals and corporations to leverage new technology to be more efficient. The following post was handwritten by Daniel into a Moleskine notebook (see image below), and then added to Evernote, where it was emailed to iDictate to be transcribed. Users of the Moleskine notebook have included Ernest Hemmingway, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh. Daniel is the author of the best selling Evernote & Springpad GTD e-books. iDictate users interested in any of Daniel's productivity books receive a 25% discount by entering promo code "iDictate" in the DEG Consulting Bookstore.
You may recall, I recently wrote a piece on the 5-Day Analog Challenge, where I challenged myself and all of you to appreciate paper once more to enhance our productivity. Well, here’s another reason to appreciate paper.
I travel a lot on airplanes, and there’s generally about 20 minutes or longer that you need to turn off all electronics until you hit 10,000 feet. In that 20 minute timeframe, my mind ignites with thoughts about projects, commitments and tasks. I can’t help it! It’s like the moment they say turn off your electronics, my brain turns on! But, when you really think about it, it’s actually of no surprise. When we finally allow ourselves to go offline, the magic of our brain goes “online”. We become more focused because there’s no ringing, dinging, pinging, buzzing, tweeting, et cetera. You can’t distract yourself with status updates or e-mails. We become focused. So, during this time that I can’t open Evernote or Springpad or Drafts to get these thoughts onto something bigger than a 4×4 US Airways cocktail napkin, I pull out my journal.
I see the convergence of both analog and digital tools such as the Evernote Moleskine, Whitelines LINK, and the Livescribe pen as ways to reinvent how we use paper and our digital devices. Our thoughts can now live in both the analog & digital world, allowing us to capture and collect our thoughts to process, organize, review and act on at a later date. Fellow productivity guru, Mike Vardy, has posted before about why paper just works (and here, here, and here!).
If you use Evernote and have neat enough handwriting, you can leverage the OCR technology to search your handwriting.
As an added bonus, you can email your hand-written notes directly from your Moleskine, Evernote, Penultimate, or any other application directly to mynotes@idictate.com and your notes will be transcribed by a live person at iDictate for just a couple cents a word! And as an added bonus, when you create your iDictate account, enter “GOLD” as the promo code and your account will be credited $5.00.
In fact, not only was this entire post written in that 20 minute timeframe from runway to 10,000 feet in my Evernote Moleskine, but iDictate turned it into a text document for me!
Quicktate recently released a new RESTful API to help make integrating with the service a breeze. That said, while our new RESTful API documentation uses Swagger to generate our service documentation, many of the common RESTful semantics we rely on are completely missing from that documentation. Until we figure out an easier way to convey that information via Swagger, here’s some basic information on how to get around the API.
If you are a developer, you should contact Support to request free transcription while you develop and test your application. After creating an account you can log in and retrieve your API Key in Profile.
Authentication
All requests currently are performed using HTTP Basic authentication. While we are still developing our OAuth provider and intend to use that as our primary mechanism for authenticating users, we currently are accepting your username and password via a standard HTTP Basic Authorization request. As a raw HTTP header, you are looking at the following for authenticating as demo@quicktate.com with password Test1234%:
As a cUrl request, you’ll be looking at using the -u demo@quicktate.com:Test1234%argument to the command.
Transcription Requests
The basis of Quicktate is transcriptions. However, while there is a /transcriptionresource for our API, you don’t actually create transcriptions - that’s the job of our typists. Instead, you submit a /transcriptionrequest to Quicktate and operate on that request until a typist has completed transcribing and turns it into a /transcription.
So, we expect very little in the HTTP headers for this type of request. Because you’re creating a new Transcription request, the method will be POST. What’s most important is the body of the request. Most developers are used to submitting the request as a form request, to where in a PHP application, the variables will come across in $_POST. In this case, however, we expect the body of the message to be either XML or JSON (as indicated in the Content-Type header).
What should be in the body of the message? The transcription request. When creating a transcription request for the first time, you’ll need to supply us with the following information:
Field Name
Required?
Description
callbackDestination
No
The URL or e-mail address where a callback should occur upon completion of the transcription.
“callbackMethod“
No *
The way the callbackDestination should be invoked. This is mandatory if callbackDestination is specified. Valid values include: “HTTPPOST“, “RESTPOST“, “XMLRPC“, “EMAIL“.
“metadata“
No
Your custom metadata for this transcription request. This is sent back to you in the callback so that you have data you can trace back to some internal identifier or record.
“language“
Yes
Pretty self-explainatory. Valid values are: 1 = English, 2 = Spanish. Others on the way!
“audiourl“
Yes
The URL of the audio file you wish to be downloaded and transcribed. Must be accessible from the internet. This is required if no “audiodata“ is present.
“audiodata“
Yes
A Base 64 encoded block of the audio file to be transcribed. This is required if no “audiourl“ is present.
So, a sample HTTP request might look like the following:
What’s important to realize is that you will only have a successful request submitted when the status code returned is a 201. If you get a 400-level error message, check which one. If it’s a 401 or a 403, then you are not sending the proper credentials. If it’s just a 400 error, then you need to look at how you’re sending your data to the API, because the API doesn’t recognize the payload.
Once you’ve gotten past that, you may be wondering, how do I access the transcription request now? There is no body to this whatsoever. This is one of those REST semantics at play. If you look in the return headers, there is a Location header which specifies exactly where you can access your transcriptionRequest. Simply submit a GET request to that URL and you’ll find the status of your transcriptionRequest. The response will look something similar to the following:
That is, until your transcription is complete. Once your transcription is complete, the resource URL will permanently move. As a result, you’ll see the status code for the previous URL change from 200 to 302, indicating that it’s been permanently moved. Fortunately, we point you in the direction of where you need to go again, through the Location header:
