When I met recently for an interview with Heather Jones, the new executive director of Iowa Sister States, I couldn’t resist showing off the cool app that I’ve begun using lately on my smartphone — Otter. The app instantaneously records and transcribes interviews with a pretty remarkable accuracy rate. My colleague, innovation writer Kate Hayden, introduced it to me, and it’s been catching on with our writing staff here at the Business Record as a great labor-saver over transcribing recorded audio notes.  

“It’s very Harry Potter-esque, isn’t it?” Jones remarked as she followed our conversation appearing on my phone’s screen. Having grown up a Harry Potter fan, it reminded her of the “quick quotes quill,” which as she recalled “didn’t take everybody’s real words, but instead kind of mashed them up into advantageous things for their newspaper.”  

I can assure our readers that Otter doesn’t feature a quick quotes quill mode, and I would recommend it to anyone who might want to take some quick meeting notes with a handful of people or fewer in a small setting. The app, which I downloaded on my iPhone’s App Store, gives you 600 free minutes each month.