How to use Microsoft Word for transcriptions? Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. Just a reminder, Ask
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askleo.com/patron for more information. So, what a
lot of people don't realize is that Microsoft Word can be used
to create transcriptions. You do have to have Microsoft
Office subscription for this to happen but it's a pretty nifty
feature if you do and I know that many of you already have
Microsoft Office in one form or another. There's a catch and
I'll show you the catch. Let's have a look. So, this is my
Windows 10 home machine. You can see it's got my favorite
homepage. What I'm going to do is go to Office.com. You'll
notice I am not starting the program from the start menu.
The catch, if you wanna call it that, I'm gonna open up a word
document here is that this transcription feature is
available only in the online version of Microsoft Word. So,
we're actually in OneDrive Live.com but you can see we're
running the online version of Microsoft Word. This actually
is documented to only work in Chrome which is what I'm using
here and in Microsoft Edge but I that will change over time.
So, great you ask. Transcriptions, how do I do it?
Over here, there's this dictate option and if you click on the
little down arrow, you'll see that there's a transcribe. If
you don't see transcribe, then you're probably looking at the
desktop version of office. Like I said, this needs to be the
web online version. I'll hit transcribe and we get an option
now to either start recording directly from the microphone if
you like or to upload your audio. I'm going to do the
upload. I happen to have a audio file, one of the
episodes, podcast episodes from one of my more recent articles.
I'll go ahead and open that and you can see that it says, we're
transcribing. Exactly how long it'll take is unclear. Probably
depends on a number of factors including perhaps even the load
on the server. They are uploading the file to the
Microsoft servers. They are running their processing on it
and they are transcribing it. Now, there is one limitation
that you may or may not encounter. As it turns out, at
least for the time being, there's a 5 hour per month
limit on how much you can actually transcribe by
uploading. Depending on your needs and how often you end up
using this, that may or may not actually impact you. In my
case, this is a very short podcast episode probably on the
order of five or ten minutes. So, it's not gonna make a big
dent in my specific usage of this feature. And there we have
it. We have a transcription. Now, you can see here that
you've got a transcription with different speakers identified.
In this case, of course, there's just one speaker, me.
Now, you can if you like play the audio and it'll walk you
through here and as you can see, you have an edit icon so
that you can edit the transcription to make it a
little bit more accurate but once you're done, you can now
add to document. The add to document can be just the text.
It can you can Include the speakers that were identified
in the text. You can include the timestamps that may or may
not help you as you're going through. You can see here we've
got timestamps 48 seconds in. There's speaker one, me. A
minute and 2 seconds in. There's speaker one again. You
can include that in the document or not. I'm just gonna
take the text. And there we have it. We have a transcript
of a podcast episode for my article 134173 and if you read
through this, you may see that it is more or less accurate. It
depends a lot on the clarity of the audio, the clarity of the
speaker, and even them. The transcription technology that
is out there for automated transcriptions be at Microsoft
or any of the other solutions, they're not perfect. They just
aren't. They can't get all of the nuances. They can't
necessarily get all of the correct word choice based on
context. However, this can be a very good start to getting
yourself a transcription of something for which you only
have audio and if you've already got Microsoft Office,
you already have this feature. I hope this was helpful. It was
eye opening for me when I discovered that this was
available. For updates, related links, for comments, and more,
visit askleo.com/13474 seven. I'm Leo Notenboom. This is
askleo.com. Thanks for watching.