Leave a Review Livescribe+
Product is not like what it used to be.
I bought the symphony thinking it had the same capability as the echo, nowhere on the store site did they mention that the newer models would both be worse in quality and not being able to record audio like the previous models. The audio is the main reason I even wanted to get something for notes to be taken in a professional setting without an extra device out in the open. With that being said the actual app is not user friendly at all, if you want to really figure out how to use it you’re going to have to put your time into learning it which will take even longer due to the crashes and general bugginess of the application. Don’t make my mistake, read these reviews!Show lesssnugglestruggle5
Disappointing
I am a part time student using assistive technology for note taking. Had an echo pen for several semesters, liked how I could play back audio from notebook, search archived notebooks, and export pdfs as either selected pages or continuous multi page docs. The plastic housing on the pen around the ink cartridge cracked and began cracking where the camera is embedded. I updated with the symphony pen last year. Pen has nice writing experience in that is more comfortable to hold than the necessarily large echo pen, but in addition to Bluetooth issues and failures to save audio as others have noted in their reviews, I cannot export multi page notebooks to a single pdf. Could only upload to Dropbox, which saved one notebook of 180 pages as 180 single pdf documents. Found I had to push very hard on pen to properly record complete pen strokes. Did not enjoy experience of the pencasts, as I had to work off computer because iPhone screen is too small to properly read from. Always trouble getting the pen to sync and update to computer. Works a bit better with an iPad, but then one may as well get the Apple Pencil for less and pay for a decent note taking app. I liked the echo pen and app, how it gave me readable and searchable files, and that it could easily share notes. It was a great piece of assistive tech that helped a lot. The new live scribe app and pen is not very assistive, very time consuming to use now and too unreliable.Show lessAssistive Tech User
Much improved in late 2021
I have a Livescribe 3 Pen and have used the system for many many years. At times I really liked it. At other times I was frustrated, usually by the problem in connecting the pen to the phone app so that it would transfer my notes. To my surprise when using the pen today, I could see that the Bluetooth connection worked with my phone even though the app was not open. From what I can tell, it is transmitting my writing to the phone app as I write, even with the app closed. This is so much better. I will be very happy if this continues to work that way. Incidentally, I have a Boox Note Air and had been thinking of discontinuing use of my Livescribe app and pen. However, both definitely have their place. I Will be using this for years to come as long as it continues operating.Show lessrickcarlson.112
Freezes, crashes - not helpful
I purchased a livescribe pen hoping that in 10+ years the kinks that I saw in the very beginning would be worked out. For 1 whole day I was excitedly thinking all was well with the pen and app. I wrote on the pad and it wrote in real-time on my device. Yay!!
Day 2, started being a bit clunky, some parts of words written would show up on the screen and then disappear only to return hours later. Auto send was a random event, sometimes yes and sometimes no Annoying but still workable.
Day3, the app is frozen, despite multiple restarts. Completely useless.
So very disappointed that a potentially amazing tool is hung up with terrible software (and that’s not even starting to talk about the issues with the desktop version!)Show lesskkssco
Great
I have been using this app for a while , and even though it has had a few problems, fixed now, it so great to be able to store hand written notes in this way.Vedaman
Core Functionality is Okay, But Poor Usability and Numerous Minor Bugs
I have a cognitive disability and use the Livescribe Symphony pen to record and take notes during lecture. It’s difficult to get the pen to pair with the app in the first place, and it seems random whether or not the app detects the pen. When it does pair, it asks me to register the pen, despite the fact that I’ve gone through the registration screen multiple times in the past.
The pen needs a better desktop app; I’d prefer simply to use it with my laptop, since using my phone to record rapidly drains its battery and storing lengthy audio recordings on the phone consumes its already limited storage. I don’t understand why the desktop app doesn’t offer the same functionality.
The PDFs the app generates are decent quality, but when I export a pencast as a MOV, pen strokes pop in and out of existence in the video, and the resolution flips between low-res and (relatively) high-res periodically (about once per second), which is irritating.
The whole thing feels more like a beta than a finished product.Show lessHWikle
Help my live scribe app keeps shutting down
I have never had this problem before. My live scribe keeps shutting down every time I open it.kikireinya
Horribly unreliable app
I’m using a LiveScribe Aegir pen with this app and it’s horribly unreliable, unpredictable, unresponsive. Notetaking works OK most of the time but Pencasts are a complete failure unless they are extremely short. I have an iPhone 7 that works perfectly fine for all my other applications.Rob (Ottawa)
Huge improvement
The product has improved ten fold over the last two years. I’ve been a user for five years and I saw big improvement on stability.
I use the product mainly for education purpose.ABostonuser
Poor OCR
The OCR capability was a big part of why I purchased this pen. Unfortunately, the hardware is only as good as the software that processes its data. For example: I wrote a full page of notes, but only the first few words are read in the OCR. The notes on the rest of the page are visible, so this isn't a syncing issue. There is also no option available to ask the program to repeat the OCR process on any given 'snippet' within the feed. Similarly, there is no option to OCR the entire page and export that. This is a serious limitation, particularly when efficiency is the purpose of the whole enterprise. There should be a built-in option to export a whole page to OCR text and to push that to one of the supported cloud services (ex. Evernote or Dropbox). Furthermore, the website is a mess. Finding the desktop download links is much, much less straightforward than it should be. If Livescribe wants to secure the professional market (ex. lawyers, physicians), this is a mandatory improvement in order for the system to be professionally viable.
Finally, one of the advertised functions is digitizing drawings (a picture of a dog drawn on unruled paper is in the promotional images). However, there is no unruled paper option available either by purchasing through the store or by download. This is, in my opinion, false advertising. Furthermore, for anyone who might be looking for an art-based use for livescribe, since the camera is dependent on a proprietary dot grid to function, the pen will be unable to recognize any drawing with more than very simple, unweighted line work. This limitation is inherent to the system, and while not the main reason I purchased the pen, is worth being aware of.Show lessthehalfgalactic
