Convert Audio To Text

Im one of the co-founders at Sonix so my opinion may be a bit biased but I think that Sonix is one of the best online audio transcription software platforms s . From your question it looks like you are asking for two things You have audio files that you want to transcribe Let me break it down. 1 You have audio files that you want to transcribe In my own opinion the features that you should look for are (in order) Privacy - you want to ensure that your audio files are always secure. Look for sites that use SSL have strong security controls in place and are trusted by large businesses Speed - automated transcription is much faster than manual transcription s with substantial cost savings. It almost a no-brainer. See how Sonix works in this video; s 2 You are price conscious and are looking for a free solution Personally I feel that you get what you pay for. Option 1 Voice Typing in Google Docs To transcribe your files for free youll have to oveplicate and add more time to your workflows. But if that fine you can use the Voice Typing feature in Google Docs The downside to using Voice Typing by Google Docs is that youll have to play your audio file at 1x speed make sure that your speaker is close to your microphone and stay quiet the entire time. As a point ofparison Sonix can transcribe a one hour file in about 536 minutes. It not worth the 55 minutes to save a few dollars. Option 2 YouTube Another option is to use YouTube to transcribe your file. Once you upload your video file and make it public YouTube will automatically transcribe it. You can then download the subtitles Closed Captioning from the interface (Located in Details Advanced) for that video file The downside to using the YouTube solution is your video file has to be public before the transcript is accessible. For those of you who are transcribing sensitive information this is a non-starter. Secondly there are no editing features youll have to download the transcript (which isn perfect) and then edit it in your favorite editor. Not even in Microsoft Word. Option 3 Use the free trial at Sonix. We offer 3 minutes of free transcription to your account so you can test your audio files with our automated transcription algorithms. And if you do like the accuracy of the transcript and the quality of our software we hope that you join ourmunity. We offer transcription as low as $5 per recorded hour with subscription; see Sonix pricing plans the most affordable automated transcription s . You really do get what you pay for. Thanks for making it this far. We hope that you give Sonix a try!

Ive been using speech recognition or voice-to- software for years. Our brain is a wonderfulputer that can listen to someone talking and filter out meaning from poor grammar thick or regional accents clumsy diction and so on. The best of modernputers do a fairly good job but the user will still have to read and edit the . Even if the original voice recording is high quality and the diction is good there will still be errors. When you hear that the program is 98% accurate that means that there will be about two errors for every 1 words. If you are recording a conference presentation you will still have lots of errors when you are dealing with several thousand words. To begin to get a voice to the voice will have to be recorded regardless of the software you use. For that you will need a good recorder a good microphone and the mic should be fairly close to the mouth of the speaker something like s s . Practice and learn how to make good clean recordings before you try to capture the material you will want to convert to . Youll will probably need some audio recording software. Audacity is free and works on Windows Mac and Linux s s A decade ago I was using Dragon NaturallySpeaking software. It was expensive it required me to read a prepared so that it could learn my voice mannerisms and the keystrokes required to manipulate Dragon required some study to gain proficiency. It was best for me dictating instead of typing. I still have it but now Im using other solutions especially if I am recording someone else such a speaker at a conference. It is mainly for dictation and you will need a mic or a headset to capture your words but the software includes the recorder. Nowadays there is some free speech recognition software. These will require the voice to speak clearly with good diction and pronunciation in a language that the software recognizes. Smartphones have speech recognition built in and if you have such a device then you don need me to describe how to use it. Google uses speech recognition on a number of its services. Youtube generates closed caption using speech recognition and has a fairly arcane process to allow you to edit that . You may find a use for the speech recognition in Gmail and Google Docs. It works quite well. If you want a program that has a human listen to the recording and transcribe the words your search engine will quickly show a number ofpanies providing that service. The price is usually $1 or more per minute. I see that Rev is a sponsor on Quora s s . Rev has aputer service (no humans are listening) that Ive been using for about 18 months called Temi s s . Temi claims 85% accuracy and it has a nifty editor built in to the website software. It allows you to hear the recording as it highlights the it has generated. It really facilitates the editing process. The cost is $.1 per minute. I have recorded myself and speakers at conferences and had that all processed by Temi. There is a free trial. Here again the higher quality the recording the better the results. If you have more than one person talking (say a panel discussion) the software does a pretty good job of identifying each of the speakers.

Recorder by Google is probably what you want. It saves both audio and and can save it in your Google Drive or send it to your email Recorder - Apps on Google Play s Otter also does this and it also attempts to note when the speaker changes. Free version is limited. Otter Voice Meeting Notes (for English) - Apps on Google Play s If the purpose is tomunicate with a hearing impaired person I rmend Live Transcribe also by Google. The UI was done in collaboration with Gallaudet University and it can recognize non verbal things like coughing. Live Transcribe - Apps on Google Play s Google Translate does transcription of course but not good for long passages Google Translate - Apps on Google Play s If youre recording a lecture and audio quality is not good you could upload the recording to Youtube and let YT do automatic captioning. It may take a long time. Or write an app using Google Speech API for Youtube (free for a few hours or speech but lots of setup required). If the recorded voice is far away or the room is noisy this will do the best job but requires the most work on your part. If your application is to search through a lecture long after it and you want to save only the important points that you didn get my favorite is Cogi - not because it can do transcription (human assisted so the accuracy is high but it expensive) but because you can tap to save the preceding 45 seconds of speech which is very useful if you realize you missed something and can request the lecturer to repeat it. Cogi 3 Notes & Voice Recorder - Apps on Google Play s

There are multiple online software platforms that make it easy to convert your audio to online. Online audio to platforms fall into 2 distinct categories manual online transcription and automatic online transcription. Manual transcription services charge roughly $1 per minute but you know you be getting great quality since an actual human is transcribing your files. You could also use automatic transcription services such as Maestra Transcription where the entire process is done automatically. Since it is all automatic there would need to be some editing. The benefits to online software are that it is priced much cheaper and you would have your files back in just minutes instead of days.

You listen to it with one hand on the pause button and your other hand on a pencil writing the words down as you listen. If its a good recording this will be a simple if slightly time consuming process. Is there dictation software that can do this for you? Yes but the decent stuff will cost you and it typically takes training to use it (where the software learns your voice). That isn necessarily an option if the audio file isn your voice. Cheaper (or free) software of this sort is likely to require more training time and closer accuracy to the trained version of words.

FREE METHOD 218 (still working 5) - Discovered via Me **Disclaimer The clarity of your audio may create a problem for you when trying to transcribe audio to ** I tried Dragon Speech Trial Google Docs a couple of transcription websites and all google transcription extensions from their store. This is the only thing that worked for long transcriptions. All other variations of this stopped due to bad internet connection where it stopped translating the video automatically. I converted a 3 minute interview using this method yesterday. It translates the video via Youtube and Google. Follow these steps after you set up a Youtube open up Google Chrome. 1.) Upload video to Youtube. 2.) Publish video. 3.) Click on your icon in the top right corner. 4.) Click on Creator Studio 5.) Click Edit button on the video you want the transcription for. 6.) Underneath video select Advanced Settings and change video language to English 7.) Wait 1 minutes - 24 hours depending on how long your video is. 8.) Click tab located at the top labeled Subtitles 9.) A green button to the right of the video will appear that says Published English (automatic) 1.) Once this button has appeared go to your actual Youtube video page. 11.) Right click any part of the page and pick Inspect 12.) Select Network on the menu on the top right of the page. 13.) Hover your mouse over the CC button on your video and click it off and on. 14.) You will see a appear under network that says timed? 15.) Right click this and press open in new tab 16.) This is your full transcription. 17.) Right click this page and press Save as 18.) Save the page to your desktop as any name but make sure to add .html at the end. e.g. 19.) Double click on the on your desktop you just saved so that it opens in your browser. Your full transcription will open in a new window. Copy

It's really interesting to read all the answers. As Nicholas Diakomihalis user 319642 mentions Dragon dictation is great for short reminders single speaker live dictations but with no way to have previously recorded audio transcribed. It only goes so far. Once you have more than 1-speaker and less than ideal conditions and different accents dragon falls apart. The technology is just not there yet and its likely years if not decades away for you to be able to record your audio content with the plethora of variations of the english accent we speak in and have it transcribed using tech. Speech recognition has definitely made huge progress no doubt but it's still not there yet. Thanks Alexandria Carstens user 2298356 for sharing the philips recorder on the iPhone. Thats definitely an interesting product. However its sad to see that they don't have a professional transcription solution connected on the backend. Transcribing yourself is a pain in the ass and it can take you between 4-5 hours to transcribe 1 hour of audio. Getting someone else to do it is a better alternative but with thousands of transcriptionspanies in the marketplace who should you pick and how can you send them the audio files easily on an ongoing basis easily? As John Fabrega user 2154658 states it is easy to transfer short 5 minute files from apps. But what about 3-6 minute long meetings interviews focus groups speechers seminars workshops etc? Figuring out how to transfer your audio recording from your iPhone toputer is a huge pain. Believe me you don't even want to go there. If you're thinking that i can google that and figure that out good luck! If you're a business professionals i'm sure you've better things to do. Even if you somehow figure that out the second major step is how to find a reliable fast value for money transcriptionpany that can deliver and not a freelancer working from home as a transcriptionist in a remote part of the world. However there is a light at the end of tunnel. Wouldn't it be awesome if you can walk into your meeting next time and follow a simple 3 step process 1. Recordn2. Upload. Transcribe That's it! You do these 3 steps and you'll get 98-1% accurate transcript in your email within 24-48 hours. Now THAT'S POWERFUL! Think about the possibilities -- record all your meetings speeches conferences and have it word-for-word transcribed in your dedicated account. No need for taking notes. At last you can be part of the meeting rather than being immersed of taking notes With the recent launch of TranscribeMe iPhone App this is a reality and you can start using it right away! Just go to Apple App Store and search for TranscribeMe. BONUS For all iPad touch users this would also work for you. Here are some other s that will give you a step-by-step walk through of how to use the app TranscribeMe iPhone App Apple App Store How To Use the TranscribeMe iPhone App n n

At the moment there are three options available for auto-transcribing human voice Automated online service Using open source solutions Outsourcing to a speechpany Keep in mind that auto transcript will not give you 1% accuracy. Humans do something like 96% I believe and an untrained speech recognition engine will most likely give you 638% depending on quality of the recording and the clarity of speech. As I have no idea what your files are and what you want to use the transcript for here are some general tips Automated online service If your audio files are recordings of one person speaking and there aren tons of them you could use Voice Base . Some other tools Pop Up Archive s For semi-automated transcription you could try NowTranscribe I hear it in beta and offers a free download. Haven tested it yet. Using open source solutions If you youre dealing with hundreds or thousands of recordings and have a developer handy you could have a look at the APIs available. These allow your program (for example one capturing audio) to directly query powerful speech recognition engines. Here a list %2recognition of few APIs that do Speech recognition. I haven used all of them so if you choose this path you might want to ask for some reviews. Alternatively you could have a go at CMUSphinx (it supports US English model). Outsourcing to a speechpany If youre thinking about transcribing phone calls or interactions involving two or more speakers I would rmend outsourcing to apany dealing with conversation or call analytics. Their biggest advantage is the ability to split audio into two channels and deliver lots of surrounding data. I obviously rmend Call Journey and not just because I work here!