«I have gotten into the habit of recording important meetings. One never knows when an inconvenient truth would fall between the cracks and vanish.»
Londo to Lord Refa in Babylon 5: «Ceremonies of Light and Dark»
If you capture ideas via audio recordings, you likely have to transcribe them. You can listen to them and write the text yourself, but that is incredibly tedious, especially when you took time to think or recorded the note when you are really tired (e.g., lying in bed, more or less asleep).
That’s where transcription software comes in (voice-to-text).
Personally, I prefer something that leaves as much of the information on my devices as possible. After all, once your recordings are in the cloud, i.e., another person’s computer, they can end up anywhere.
One way that might achieve this local capturing and transcription is to use «Just Press Record» and «Whisper Transcription». Although, no warranty here, because despite using local storage/transcription, who knows what these apps do in the background.
In «Just Press Record», simply change the storage location to «On My iPhone»:
You can then access the files via an USB cable connection:
If you use Whisper Transcription (depending on the version), you can use batch transcription to quickly transcribe the audio notes. Just use the search function in Finder once you copied the Audio folder (within that folder) and search for «kind:audio» (Check the Finder Settings under «Advanced», you might want to change «When performing a search» to «Search the Current Folder»). Select all audio files and drag them into Whisper Transcription. If you record notes in multiple languages, make sure you have «Auto»(detect language) in languages.
I chose simple text files for export. Then just select them and drag them into, e.g., an open BBEdit document. Replace a line break (\n) with a double line break (\n\n) and voila. All these tiny ideas in one text file, separated by an empty line. Ready for a check whether Whisper made a mistake and transfer to the idea collection.
Should(!) all be locally done on the computer.