Microsoft Word for Microsoft 365 had added new transcription features that look to be quite useful. As well as the dictation transcription and voice commands, Word will now transcribe recordings. I could have really used that capability in my job at the TMX Group, where I often recorded conversations with subject matter experts.
Like Google Docs, Word’s dictation feature puts whatever you say into your microphone directly on the page. Both programs are mostly accurate, but sometimes they get hung up on processing a lot of words at once and might skip a sentence or two, or get a few words wrong. The same thing happens with Otter, too, especially if there’s a lot of ambient noise. Word’s new transcribe feature is not immune to mistakes, but at first glance it seems to be more accurate than Google Docs, Otter, and even Word Dictate.
If you’re recording live via Word’s Transcribe, the tool will upload your audio file to OneDrive for processing, and then spit it back out in the side bar, complete with time stamps and the option to add in speakers’ names. From there, you can import that transcription directly into the Word doc itself with a click of a button. You can also listen back to the audio directly in Word and edit any part of the transcript the software misinterpreted.
Note that the new transcription features are only available in Word 365, the online version, not in the desktop version included with Office 2019.
For more on this features, see this article in Office Watch.
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