The green ink writes over the greyed-out words as the recorded audio reaches that point.

Pencasts can be played back within the Livescribe+ app or in a browser. To do so you need to load the PDF into Livescribe’s Player – a web app – which is a bit of a faff, but it means anyone can play back a shared PDF even if they don’t own a Livescribe pen. Pencasts can be played back using the app or via a PDF with the audio embedded within it. It makes transcribing interviews or meeting notes so much faster by getting to the right point in the recording instantly. The app is not able to record phone calls made on the device running the app, but can use a pick-up microphone to record from another phone.Īudio is then timestamped to your handwriting, meaning that you can playback precisely what was being recorded at the time you wrote a particular word just by tapping on it.

The app records sound via the smartphone or tablet’s built-in microphone, or an external mic plugged into the headphones socket. The app also has a trick up its sleeve in the form of so-called Pencasts: audio recordings bound to your pen strokes. This is certainly an interesting type of tool, and I hope it becomes more affordable in the future.Notes from page to screen. Also, additional notebooks cost £24, and they only contain 176 page, and they’re only A5 size, which is a bit small. I’m tempted by the Moleskine Smart Writing Set, but at £200 – which is a terrible conversion from $200 it should be about £170, including VAT – it’s a steep price to pay for a gadget like this. Writing is a tactile activity, and I need the friction of a pen or pencil on paper. I’ve been using the iPad Pro and Pencil recently, and I found an app that has very good handwriting recognition, even with my chicken scratch, but the iPad’s screen is too smooth to write a lot on.

I know it’s not the first such device, but I would very much like to write more rather than type, and this could be a good way to do so. The company has created a video explaining how this works. Moleskin has launched the Smart Writing Set, which is a combination of a Bluetooth pen, a special notebook, and an app, which lets you write in the notebook and have your writings – and drawings – instantly digitized.

Moleskine evernote reviews 2016