Noted: Record & AI Transcribe

The fact that dictation processing happens in the cloud and requires a subscription is really annoying. The user interface has a bewildering number of buttons and it isn’t instantly clear what each button does. Most bring up new menus with too many options. There’s things like a gear menu and a hamburger menu visible at the same time, or a record button and a microphone button on the same screen. If your cursor is in a text field, you still may need to manually open a keyboard. Dumb design choices are everywhere. I frequently found myself wondering how to do something as simple add text or god-forbid dictate to the dictation app. Mind you, I could figure it out after some tinkering, but this is a note taking app and it shouldn’t need a tutorial or a manual. No one needs half these features. The features that are needed aren’t the design priority. This is shoddily done. These people aren’t selling an app, they’re allowing you to pay them to keep developing their half-baked project. They got me suckered into a free trial and I still couldn’t find the premium features. Yikes.

The audio features are great and really helpful. It makes notetaking for lectures much easier and I am really glad I have a subscription. I really wish it had more drawing functionality. I like to draw on top of my typed notes, draw arrows between things, and make other small notes. The ability to use boxes for drawing is essentially useless for me and that is the only drawing functionality this app has. I also wish it was easier to add notes without the time stamp later. If I’m listening to the recording but want to go and add another bullet somewhere, I have to bring the recording all the way back to the beginning unless I want to add an additional timestamp. This is annoying when users could just be able to delete time stamps if they want.