Daily Dose of English 169
Voice Memos
Daily Dose of English 169
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about voice memos. which is not a very common word, the word memo nowadays, but if you have your phone in English or if you have an iPhone at least, you might've already come across this term. Although I guess those are a couple of big ifs. If you have your phone in English and if it's an iPhone, then you will probably have an app called Voice Memos by default. I don't think there's a default one on Android. I had to download one, but we'll get to that in a second. So first, what is a memo, right? There's a couple of different... definitions that it has and it's not a very common word nowadays. But it is definitely used in the sense of a short message that's usually more of an announcement, right? So it's not like you couldn't send somebody a memo as like part of a conversation, for example. Like it's not the same as a text message or an email, right? A memo has to do more that it's like saying something that doesn't really expect a response. Um, you're giving somebody this kind of announcement. And so we have this phrase where, uh, there's, I guess it's sort of like an idiom, but it's not, it's not really an idiom. It's really, I don't know, but you can say, um, I didn't get the memo or did you get the memo? Um, or like in that sort of thing is to say that somebody didn't understand or they didn't get the, they didn't hear the rules or they didn't get the main idea of what's happening. Right. So, um, let's say you go to a party and everybody's dressed, um, in some special way. They're all dressed in like 1980s style and you're just dressed normally and you go, Oh, did I miss some memo or something that I didn't get? The memo, um, refers to the, like announcement that everybody's supposed to dress like it's the 80s or whatever. And so that's generally how we use the term memo nowadays. It's also can be used in a business setting for basically an announcement, right? If there's something that has to be changed or done in the business or in the company, there might be a little memo or a bulletin is also a similar word, a bulletin. But a bulletin is usually several different announcements. And that's probably the only real difference. But yeah, I don't think you can really come across the word memo that often anymore. It's just not, I don't know, not that common of a word. Let's see, let's go to youglish, I'm curious now, youglish, ah, youish.com, which is a fantastic website for searching up pronunciations and how common things are. And yeah, there's only 3,800 different examples of the word memo, and Like that's not that many compared to other words. Like what's another, like voice is the other one in this, right? Voice has 88,000 results, which is, obviously it's a more common word, but let's see. What other word is as common as memo might be? Well, bulletin. Bulletin, or how do you spell that? Bulletain? Bulletain. Nope, I don't know how to spell it. Bulletin. Bulletin. Oh, it's got an E in it. I'm not a very good speller in English, I'm sorry. Oh yeah, bulletin is way less common actually. It's got like half the results as memo, so that's even less common. Yeah anyways it's a word that exists for sure but it's not like a super duper common word is what I'm trying to say. Let's get back to the idea though but what is a voice memo? So a voice memo is usually a short recording that you make with your voice and that is meant to be not necessarily for anybody else but for you. So when you send somebody a voice message, like on WhatsApp or another messaging app, that is a voice message, right? You're sending them a message and so you're using your voice. But a voice memo is typically for yourself or for your records or something like that. So if you want to record something to remember, you would record a voice memo. Voice memos are relatively or were more common when handheld recording devices started to become easily available. And computers still weren't as good as they are, right? And you couldn't just have a phone in your pocket. And so it was like this, like a good step between like having a personal computer at home or somewhere else, but then having a more portable thing that you could really quickly take notes on basically. And so if you watch even like not even super duper old movies or TV shows from like the early 2000s the even the 2010s You can see people using voice recorders for that sort of thing. They're recording voice memos for themselves And they and they're usually talking to themselves that they're going to go look at later If and so they wanted to don't want to forget something basically and so that's what's really useful about voice memos and Now, I wanted to talk about this because relatively recently, I actually set up a voice memo system for myself because I really wanted to have something like that. Because I frequently have, whatever, random ideas or thoughts that I'm like, oh, I should write that down. Or I should put that somewhere. Because I usually forget, right? Especially if it's the evening or like I just took a shower and I've just been basically thinking, it's really easy for me to forget what I thought of, basically, right? It just goes out of your head because that's how your head works, I guess. And so voice memos, I was like, oh, it would be really useful to have these memos so that I could look at them later and see what I said to myself. And so I set up a little system because I didn't want to just have my recordings on my phone and then have to like go back and listen to my recordings because that's the thing I don't like. I don't want to have to go sit down and listen to my recordings and be like, okay, what did I say? So I made a system and that's what I think is really fun. If you go back to the episode on automation, I talk a little bit about doing things like this, but what I did is I figured out what I wanted. So what I wanted is to be able to look at a summary of all my recordings that I have taken, and quickly see what I wanted to do. they are about and then listen to them if I wanted. And so I figured out how to do all those steps. So the first step is that I record on my phone. I have a simple app called ASR. I forget what it's actually called. It's like audio something recorder. It's an Android app. But it's very simple and that's why I like it. And I can just press record and then I can press the save button. And then it records my voice and then it saves that audio to my phone. But then the cool thing is that I also hooked it up to my, I have a home server. So you could do this with like Google drive or whatever, but I have a home server, which is basically just a computer that's running, uh, server stuff. I'll write that down as an episode idea. Home servers. Great. That'll be episode 183 because I already have a whole bunch of ideas in the works. Um, but then it uploads those recordings to my home server so that they're on my server. So if I lose my phone, I'll still have my recordings on my, on my server. And then I have a, a script that runs on my computer once a day to not like my personal computer, the one that I use to record all these episodes on and stuff and work on. And then it downloads all of those recordings that it doesn't already have. And then, this is the cool part, it uses speech-to-text transcription software to write what I said. So if I go look in my voice memos folder, where did I put that? Here it is, voice memos. I can go see the text versions of all of my recordings and I can just read them, right? So I can see here's one from set August 14th. And I told myself to remember to order the pizza tomorrow. I don't remember what that's for, but that was apparently something important on the 14th of August. And as all these have actual voice, sorry, transcriptions of what I said. Then, I also have my system make a summary, is what I'm calling it, where it writes down every single different day that I made a recording, and it takes the first sentence of that recording, and makes it a line, and then it also adds the audio file, so that I can look at it in my notes system, and it says the first line, what's gonna happen, or sorry, like what the thing is about, then it has the audio that I can just click on and listen to the entire thing if I want. And so it's a nice, quick... way to see and listen to and reference all of my different recordings and it is actually relatively simple. It's just a couple of different steps. And yeah, I think it's a really fun system. I don't use it that much, right? I only have these thoughts every so often, but it is helpful when I do have them because I know that that thought is going to be trapped somewhere. and recorded. So that's what I really like. But yeah, that is everything for voice memos. That is the entire, that is our time for today. I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learned a little something about my weird interests, but I hope that you had a wonderful day and I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Bye.
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