How to Transcribe Semi Automatically using Dictation Software

Automatic machine transcription software works well for audio that's well-recorded with minimal background noise and interruptions. But, when the audio quality is not sufficient for machines to pick up the speech accurately, there is a neat trick you can use to leverage current Dictation software technology to transcribe nearly any type of audio recording, including even songs. Dictation technology only supports single speakers and can easily get confused when there’s background noise or interjections in the audio. But this is ok, since this technique of transcribing works effectively regardless of the quality of the source audio.

Say hello to transcribing using dictation, aka Voice Typing:

1. Visit Transcribe, login to your account, click on "transcriptions" in the top bar and then click on New Self Transcription.
2. Load the audio/video into our editor and slow it down if the speaker(s) is (are) too fast.
3. Connect your headphones to your computer and turn on Transcribe’s dictation feature by clicking on the green “Dictate” button.
4. Now, repeat what you hear in your headphones into your microphone. You will see your speech automatically be converted to text.

You are effectively converting your source audio into a single voice (your voice) and giving it as input to the voice recognition engine which is trained to recognize a single speaker. You are also eliminating any background noise from the source audio as you re-speak it into your microphone in your own voice, in a quiet environment.

Of course, the recognition can still be a little off, so be prepared to go over your dictation-transcription a second time to correct typos and add in punctuation and formatting.

Note that this feature only work with Google Chrome.When you first click on the “Dictate” button in Transcribe, Google Chrome will ask you permission to let Transcribe access your microphone. Make sure you click on “Allow”:

As a bonus, the dictation engine supports over 60 languages including English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Hebrew and many more: