Use These Apps to Transcribe Your Video Chats and Activities
While it sucks that smarter schools are closing their campuses and moving to virtual teaching, there is one big silver lining for this transition: it’s much easier to take notes, take notes, and automatically generate complete transcripts of your online lessons and meetings. …
At one time, I brought notebooks to classes to write my notes by hand. I later bought a giant Dell laptop that probably lasted one hour on a single charge, if I was lucky, which was a very small improvement for my studies.
How I wish I could hang out in my house or apartment and walk into class using one of my 2020 laptops. Then I will be able to record the entire class using whatever virtual chat software I have used.
Or better yet, I could use an application like Microsoft Word or Google Docs to automatically transcribe whatever I heard (as much as possible). This will then create a searchable document that I can use to supplement my notes – instead of furiously trying to write down everything I heard.
Transcribe your virtual meetings in Microsoft Word
First, you’ll need an Office 365 account. Microsoft’s recently released transcription feature only works in Word on the web today, but it will eventually make its way to the company’s iOS and Android apps.
Open a new Word document, click the drop-down arrow next to “Dictate” in the toolbar, and then click “Transcribe:”
In the sidebar that appears, you can choose whether you want to load your own sound into Word for transcription, or just start transcribing any sound it hears on your computer. If possible, choose the latter because you will be allowed a lot more. As Microsoft writes :
“With Transcribe, you are completely limitless in how much you can record and transcribe in Word for the web. Currently there is a limit of five hours per month for uploads, and each upload is limited to 200MB. “
Once you start recording, you can let Word chug in the background and pause at your leisure – for example, if your class or meeting takes a short break. You won’t see words start appearing on your screen. After you finish writing, Word will start processing it and you will see the results in the sidebar:
You can give each speaker a name, and highlighting whatever text you see and clicking the plus sign that appears will automatically insert it into your open document (along with the specified speaker’s name, so make sure you check that first). You can also play back your recording, which highlights the different parts of your transcription (in the sidebar) in real time.
And it’s all! One thing to note about this whole process is that Word’s transcription feature by itself does not extract audio from your PC. So if you just watch YouTube videos with headphones, it won’t understand anything. This feature records from your system’s microphone, so make sure it works and can take part in any meeting you attend before triggering the transcription feature so you don’t have more than an hour of silence.
Transcribing your virtual meetings in Google Docs
First, open a new Google Doc in Chrome – yes, it should be Chrome. Click on “Tools” and select “Voice Dialing” and then click on the large microphone icon to start.
But wait! Before clicking that microphone, you’ll want to launch whatever app or audio you’re trying to capture (and, as before, make sure your microphone is working and ready to record). Unlike Microsoft’s implementation of transcription, you actually need to stay on the Google Docs screen to keep recording.
Click on anything else and the recording will stop. In addition, Google’s feature dumps everything it hears into one big wall of text, as voice typing is really designed for Google to transcribe what you say (including repeating period and newline when you need to).
However, the Google version is completely free, that’s all. It might not look very pretty, but if you just need backups of everything you do or listen to, it’s hard to beat the free live transcription service that works well enough. At least it’s interesting to watch the text erupt in real time.
If you don’t like any of the options, there are alternatives. You can try using a service like otter.ai or Scribbl to transcribe live meetings (or meeting recordings), but each has its own limitations. The only “free” and “unlimited” transcription service I’ve found is the Google option, but again, it’s a little flawed.