Hi everyone, Kevin here. Today I want to show you how you can convert audio into text. We're going
to use an app that comes with Windows 10 and we're going to combine that with a virtual audio cable.
If that sounds confusing, don't worry, we're going to walk through all of this step by step.
This works with all major languages, it's free, and there are no time limits at all. All right,
let's jump on the PC, not literally, and let's see how we can do this. To convert audio into text,
I mentioned that we're going to use two separate tools, and the good news is you already have one
of these tools. It comes for free with Windows 10, and it's called the dictation tool. If
you've never used it before, you can launch it by pressing the Windows logo key on your keyboard
together with the H key. H as in hotel. This opens up the dictation tool on the top of the screen,
and to have it start listening, simply click on the microphone icon.
Testing, testing, one, two, three. Testing, testing, one, two, three.
Once you're done, simply click on the microphone icon again and then it'll stop listening,
and here you see all of the text that I said. It transcribes all of this text for me.
The dictation tool works really well when I feed in live audio, so I talk right now,
it transcribes it, and it gives me the result. But what if I want to, let's say, take a video file,
or maybe I want to take a pre-recorded audio file, and I want to transcribe that. Well,
we need to get another tool called a virtual audio cable, and for that let's open up our web
browser. The second tool that we're going to get is called a virtual audio cable, and my favorite
one is made by a company called VB Audio Software. You can download it at the following website,
and it's completely free to download. This will allow us to take the output from an app like, say,
a video player, or maybe you're listening to a podcast. It'll allow you to take any type of sound
output, and we'll be able to use this to feed it into the dictation tool.
On this page, click on the download link and run through the installation process. Once you finish
installing, next we need to set up our computer so it uses the new virtual audio cable. Down on the
taskbar in the search field, type in sound, and then click on the best match for sound settings.
This opens up sound settings, and here we need to modify two different settings. Up on top, we can
choose our output device, and currently I have it set to my computer speakers. Select this drop-down
list and switch it over to cable input. This is going to send the output into our virtual cable.
Down below, we can also choose our input device, and this is typically your microphone.
Here, click on the drop-down list, and here let's switch it to the cable output. By doing this,
once again, it's going to take the output from, say, a video player, a podcast, a sound recording,
and it's going to take that output and it's going to feed it into the input, or basically
feed it into our microphone. Once we finish the transcription, or once we convert our audio into
text, you can come back into sound settings and you can restore it back to the default.
For now, we're all done making changes, so we can close this window out. Now that we have everything
configured, we are ready to convert audio into text. I opened up my web browser and I navigated
to my favorite YouTuber, Kevin Stratvert. I want to take I want to take the talk track from this
video and I want to turn it into a transcript. Once again, I want to open up Windows Dictation.
I'll press the Windows logo key together with H, H as in hotel. Over here, I'll click on play
on the video. Next, I'll click into Notepad, so that's currently the active text field,
and then I'll click on the microphone icon. Here now, the dictation tool is listening to the video
and it's turning the talk track into text. Look at that! That is pretty cool. Now all in all,
it'll do a pretty decent job. It might miss some punctuation here and there, and a few of
the words might be a little bit off, but it's very readable and I can easily understand it. Here you
see that it's currently catching up with what I'm saying. I guess I'm kind of a fast speaker,
but here you see it turn it into a transcript. Now I can go and play this entire video and I'd have a
transcript of everything that I said. Once I'm all done, I'll go up and click on the microphone and
that'll stop the Windows Dictation tool. All right, well let me know down below
in the comments, were you able to successfully transcribe a file? If you enjoyed this video and
you'd like to see future videos like this, please consider subscribing. All right, well that's all
I have for you today. I hope you enjoyed and as always, I hope to see you next time. Bye.