the new, higher-capacity, more ergonomic Livescribe Echo in August and have spent the last few weeks putting the pen through its paces. I’ve also gathered up testimonials about the device — mostly from other journalists, who understandably love it — and questions and tips from ordinary users.

Just like our How to Do (Almost) Everything With A Kindle 3, this is a list of (almost) everything you could do with a Livescribe Echo smartpen — plus a few Q&As at the end.

Indexing Audio

Among journalists, the Atlantic’s James Fallows has been the most enthusiastic and eloquent supporter of the Livescribe. In “The Pen Gets Mightier,” Fallows describes his love for the smartpen, particularly its ability to match handwriting with audio. “The result is a kind of indexing system for an audio stream,” Fallows writes. “For me this means instant access to the three interesting sentences — I just write ‘interesting!’ in the notebook or put a star—in the typical hour-long journalistic interview.”

In my experience, as in Fallows’, this is absolutely game-changing. I’ve tried a number of devices to record interviews, from traditional recorders to my iPhone’s Voice Memo app, even Google Voice for telephone calls. None of them are as reliable or useful after the fact as the Echo.

It captures ambient speech remarkably well, even at distance. It even works fairly well recording a speakerphone-to-speakerphone conference call, a feat that gives a good deal of trouble to most people’s ears, let alone their recording gadgets.

You can play back recordings using the pen’s built-in speaker, or by uploading the pencast to your computer. There the Livescribe Desktop application (on Mac or Windows) can print your written notes to a PDF file or export your audio for archiving or editing.

It’s particularly useful to export written notes to online note–management applications that can handle PDFs like Evernote for remote storage.

Recording Speeches and Classroom Lectures

In The New York Times, Wired columnist Clive Thompson profiled Brian Lacata, an Oakland math teacher whose students all use Livescribe pens in his class.

In the classroom, the smartpen is a curious mix of the traditional and the high-tech. As Thompson notes, “the pen is based on an age-old classroom technique that requires no learning curve: pen-and-paper writing.” But while audio recording has been used for some time (not without controversy) to tape lectures and meetings, it changes with the use of the smartpen.

When Lacata’s students take notes, “the pen alters their writing style: Instead of verbatim snippets of Lacata’s instructions, they can write ‘key words’ — essentially little handwritten tags that let them quickly locate a crucial moment in the audio stream.” Essentially, it offloads the raw-data–recording component of note-taking to the audio stream, while placing the tagging, indexing, thinking and questioning components firmly within script. Instead of notes, you’ve recorded a mind-map.

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Authors: Tim Carmody

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