Take notes without typing in word?

One of my classmates was saying how he uses his macbook to take notes in class by recording the teacher and it translates it to words. How do I do this? I can't find anything in word that seems to have anything to do with this!

He must have some pretty advances voice recognition software that manages to edit out all the background voice in the class.

Have you seen him put a wireless microphone near the teacher or is he just pulling your leg

There is voice recognition software that will turn sound in to words but it usually requires the speaker to be close to the mic and without too much background noise

That is as far as I know

Wow.

I wish I could do that, but whenever I use my MBP to record the lecture, it's way too fuzzy.

Are you sure he said he can do it, as opposed to he wants to do it?

is he just recording it then later translating it?

Even if it worked, it seems like a fairly inefficient way to learn something. At some point you need to synthesize the information. You can have complete transcripts and complete books covering the material, but unless you're incorporating it into your own self, it's just a bunch of words and symbols.

Actively listen to what the teacher has to say, ask questions, and if you still don't get it, ask more questions later. Take the notes that will help you remember things.

There's no way this will be automatically translated. He is surely manually transcribing it. For voice recognition the person has to speak in very distinct words that the software can understand, and it also has to go through some training procedure before doing that.

Anyway, the new speech recognition app for the Mac, Macspeech is going to take care of that. It uses the dragon engine which is popular on windows and is supposed to be much better than iListen, the previous Mac app. Arrives late feb/march.

He could be using IBM Via Voice.

Thanks for all the replies, He said he sits in the front of the class and it types for him, I didn't really believe him but thought it would be nice to just set up my macbook and let it record the notes while I listen and also give me all teh info to study later.

Via Voice will do what he is telling you. My wife has a copy. She speaks into a usb mic and types whatever she says.