Transcribe Audio to Text: How to Start

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Have trouble deciding about which way to go when you transcribe audio to text? You are not alone. There are so many options that it makes you incapable of deciding for yourself. This state of analysis paralysis makes you waste your valuable time and energy. Or even worse: you end up choosing the bad option.

I used to feel the same as you. I felt so lost, trying each and every method to transcribe audio to text one by one. It was terrible since it meant not having a consistent way to do my tasks. Not mentioning the huge amount of money and effort that went into examining the options to transcribe audio to text.

That’s why I wish I had stumbled upon a paper just like this one. When you finish reading it, you will have adequate information about all of the options. You will be ready to make your own choice. So let’s analyze them one by one.

Options to Transcribe Audio to Text

Choosing to Not Outsource Transcription

You may very well choose to do your transcriptions yourself by hand. That’s usually how people start. Although they usually grow tired of this option very quickly. Particularly the people for whom transcription is an ongoing task, and not a one-off thing. Why is this a bad option you ask?

To Transcribe Audio to Text, a Huge Amount of Effort is Required

This option is ridiculously hard. Especially if you are not a trained transcriptionist. Even for professional transcriptionists, it’s an extremely inconvenient and arduous task. You have to actually sit through an entire recording, playing it, pausing it, and then playing it again. Not to mention the hardships that the sound recording will throw at you. The weird accent of the speaker, the blur of the audio, and so on. Think about trying to understand and reciting a weird accented guy. It would feel like hell for lots of people. For every hardship, the difficulty of the task adds up and hits you like a ton of bricks.

Transcribing audio into text manually takes a lot of Time

All this struggle goes on for a tremendously large amount of time. A trained transcriptionist usually takes 5 hours to transcribe 1-hour audio to text. Remind yourself that as a regular person you don’t have the necessary equipment or the training that these experts have. So it will take a lot longer than 5 hours for you to transcribe audio to text.

Tools that help you Manually Transcribe Audio to Text

You can also choose options like the foot pedal, or the f4 software that serves as a transcriptor guide. What these tools have in common is that they are still in the domain of transcribing audio to text manually. These seem like they can alleviate the pain of transcribing by hand, so why not give it a try, right? Not exactly. There are still lots of problems that come with using these.

First of all, they are not free. The software charges you monthly, and it may not be that cheap. When you make this sort of investment, you need it to worth it. In this case, it may just not be. Because there are other problems with them.

Although it charges you money, you still need to spend time manually transcribing audio to text. It may improve your speed by a margin, but you will still have the limitations of being a human. Relative to the other options, this software does not improve your speed that much anyway.

Automatic Software to Transcribe Audio to Text

Automatic software is far better than the other options that we listed above. They are especially beneficial in terms of speed. Whatsmore, they make you save your effort for more important things. Particularly for modern life, this software can be said to be well fit

The two main problems with automatic software are cost and accuracy. There are no human beings involved in the process of automatically transcribing audio to text. So automatic transcription is not something that can yield the same accuracy as manual. It’s still good enough, but it’s important to know the shortcomings of each option regardless.

In order to tackle these drawbacks, there are a few things you can do.

Use In-App Editing Software to Transcribe Audio Files to Text

Look for the software that has the feature of in-app editing. If you are worried about accuracy, try transcribing audio to text by using this tool once. It makes you able to have a final touch on your text. This way, you will be confident in the knowledge that your final product will be accurate.

Use Google Docs to Transcribe Audio to text

For those who don’t want to spend any money, Google docs is an excellent free and simple option to turn audio into text. Just leave your mic open on Google Docs and it will start live audio to the text of what you are saying. This is very useful when you need to turn over some notes quickly. You may also not want to spend money on other software that might do this job just as well.

Use Third-Party Alternatives for Google Docs

However, accuracy is where Google Docs audio-to-text fails a little bit. It often misses words if they are not articulated very clearly. Whatsmore, it makes a lot of errors in punctuation. If missing commas and periods is not acceptable for your audio to text task, then you would be better off simply not using Google Docs.

One of the most popular tools for turning audio into text is dragon. Dragon is the most expensive tool by far, costing up to $500 per year. But it is also the industry standard for high-quality audio-to-text tasks.

The main problem with Google docs audio-to-text is that it is not accurate enough for more serious tasks. Transkriptor is a third-party tool that allows you to turn your audio files to text with much more accuracy and offers a reasonable price point. As a result, third-party audio-to-text tools like Transkriptor are more popular.

Use Transkriptor ot Transcribe Audio to Text

Transkriptor is a great app if you want to turn your audio recording of an interview into text. This free program allows you to upload the audio file of the recording and it will turn it into text so you can stop worrying about taking notes. This is a very useful app that can turn your recorded conversations into text. It is perfect for people who are always out on the go and can’t find time to transcribe their audio recordings.

In conclusion, technology has evolved to make taking notes easier than ever. Nowadays, there are many applications that allow you to record the audio of a meeting or lecture and then convert it into text. Transkriptor is one of these apps that you can use in the workplace. It enables users to record meetings, lectures, and presentations with their phone’s microphone and then convert this recorded audio to text. Transkriptor also allows editing and sharing of transcriptions for future reference.

You don’t have to stress about taking notes anymore, just focus on the call, and let smart apps transcribe audio to text for you!