Livescribe+

First use was great. It did transcribe my couple of sentences. Then I added more and that worked. I added more and couldn’t get it to transcribe the text though it appeared in the page image. The software has no “force transcription” option. So, I wrote at the bottom of the page and that triggered a scan of the entire page. Other stability problem: when you are looking at a transcription and select “Share transcript text and then “Save to Quicknote” it does open Quicknote but it doesn’t transfer the text; it’s just an empty note. They have been making this produce for more than a decade, surely they could have improved the UI by now and its stability.

I have had prior versions of the Smartpen that connect to my computer and that was a bit unwieldy (wired connection, etc.) but it WORKED. Thought I would “upgrade” here — I wish I had read all these reviews first because I have had all of the same experiences. It won’t connect, or has to be “re-connected” each time you use it, the sync (when it happens) is slow, I can only get playback through the pen and not any other outside speaker/headphones despite figuring out (finally) how to connect them. The instructions are terrible (but probably because whoever wrote them knows that nothing works anyhow). I’m going back to my ancient version 1 of this equipment… Livescribe owes us all an apology and a refund.

The iOS app makes a great hardware product simply insufferable. Sure, it does okay if you take some simple notes and need to search through them. But anything beyond that, let’s see where do I get started? 1. Connectivity is sparse, it doesn’t work with corporate OneNote account and their GDrive integration feels like it’s written by a first grader. You’re not going to be able to export a PDF most of the time - forget about trying to get mixed text/graphics/voice notes out of their crippled app. 2. Bugs. Is this a joke? Do you actually use your app? It crashes with 80+ page notebooks. When auto-sending to Google drive gets stuck in an endless loop overwriting a single page. If you have closed the cap on your pen in the middle of the sync, say goodbye to ever updating your notebook again. And don’t even get me started on security policies this app needs to run 3. There are 3 categories - “Tag”, “Star”, “Flag”. Want more? You’d need to buy a physical notebook for each category. TLDR; I wasted 20+ hours experimenting with import/export and this is hardly any better than taking physical notes. It’s literally easier to take photos of your notebook and then run them through OCR