What's a LiveScribe?

It sounded to good to be true, so I bought one to test. By golly, it seems to work about as they said it would.

The LiveScribe Pulse is an amazing little bundle of technology that looks like a fairly ordinary, if a bit pleasantly plump, pen. As a pen, it has an agreeable heft and feel in the hand, not too heavy or bulky. Writing is smooth and the ink flows well. All well and good - I expect these things from a $100+ pen. It's the other features of the pen that make it so amazing.

I tested the Pulse during a couple of 50-minute trainings on Office 2007 in PC East with the fantastic John Stevenson of our IT department. As members of the SOU community are probably aware, PC East sits directly off the main computer lab, with walls on three sides and a partition separating the "room" from the lab. Not really an ideal acoustic environment for recording.

Cool feature Number One: quality audio capture. The Pulse picks up a speaker's voice in a crowded computer lab surprisingly well. Using the (included) headphones, you can even get a sense of 3D sound - when a person to the right and behind me asked a question, I could tell where they were on the recording. Other than the times when I unthinkingly tapped the pen on my other hand, thunk thunk, the trainer's voice was clear and understandable.

Cool Feature Number Two: As I wrote or drew on the accompanying paper (more about that in a second), my notes synchronized to the audio. Later, I could tap on a word in my notes and hear what John was saying at the time I wrote the note. I could jump forward or jump back a little to fine-tune what I needed to recall. I could speed up or slow down John's voice without affecting his pitch, so that he was still understandable. He sounded a bit hyped up on caffeine at the higher speeds, but still understandable.

Cool Feature Number Three: by docking the pen in its cradle, I can quickly and very easily upload my notes and the audio to my computer. I can play them back on the computer the same way I can on paper, substituting a mouse click for a tap of the pen. I can archive them for future use this way. Even better, I can share them with others by uploading them to LiveScribe's website, which allows me to keep them private, share them with a select few, or share them with the world. Curious? Check them out here!

Cool Feature Number Four: there's a single-octave piano you can access by drawing 11 lines in a specific configuration on your paper. This will be an odd-but-nifty feature for most people, but as a former music major I can really see some use for this!

Reality checks: (Every piece of technology has a downside!)

1. In order to get those Cool Features, you need to use the special paper that LiveScribe sells. It looks gray, but it's actually covered with millions of tiny dots that allow the pen to "sense" where it is, tracking the pen's movement through a tiny camera on the underside of the pen. The paper currently runs $20 for four 100-page notebooks - a bit more expensive than the usual cost of paper for a college student.
   
2. Most notetaking lags behind the spoken word slightly. When you tap on the paper, you're going to get the audio that was spoken at the time you wrote, not at the time you decided to write. You may need to use the jump feature to get to the info you wanted.

At $149 (1GB memory) - $199 (2 GB memory), the Pulse compares with mid-to-high-range digital voice recorders. However, with the exciting features this offers, it may well be an excellent tool for students who have difficulty taking notes. I'll be putting it to a more rigorous trial at the AHEAD conference next week, and looking at piloting a few with students this fall. If you're a registered DSS student and would be interested in participating in a trial project with the LiveScribe Pulse, please let me know!