Who’s experienced the frustration of manual audio transcription? The time spent listening back to an audio recording and needing to pause or rewind while you hastily type out what you hear? And even if your typing speed is top notch, even the best transcriptionist can only type as fast as the audio recording itself, making converting audio to text a time-consuming process – and often an expensive one if you have to outsource the transcribing.
Although tech companies have been working on automating speech recognition since the 1950s, it’s only in the last few years, and with the rapid advancement of AI, that this technology has become efficient and accurate enough to be useful in real-life settings. Now, audio-to-text transcription is available to the everyday person, as well as to businesses and organisations. Whether it’s simply to turn a voice memo into text, or to transcribe the audio contents of a lecture or business meeting, this speech-to-text technology can save time and money, leaving you free to focus on other things.
Why would I need to convert audio to text?
Audio-to-text transcription software is becoming a popular tool in several industries, including education, law, healthcare and sales. The technology is much more efficient and affordable than traditional manual transcription services, and the text output can be generated quickly on demand. Speech-to-text tools are also being increasingly employed for personal use, removing the need for manual note-taking, and assisting with listening comprehension and studying.
Here are some reasons you might want to automate audio-to-text transcription, plus a few examples of what our customers are using our audio-to-text converter for:
💻 To repurpose content for other channels: Content creation is often an important part of running a business, but can be very time-consuming. Being able to convert your podcast or webinar to a text form you can repurpose for your website, blog or social media channel can ensure you get the most out of the content you create. Uploading a text version alongside the audio can also be a useful tactic for SEO, as the typed content is then readable by search engines.
🎤 To get transcripts from interviews or user-testing videos: If you’re performing research, being able to automatically convert interviews to text transcripts can save a lot of time. No more manually transcribing long audio recordings! The text transcripts are much easier to analyse, edit and add notes to, and can be archived more efficiently.
🦻 To improve accessibility to your content: By converting the audio to text, you can provide a transcript or subtitles to go alongside your audio file. People who are deaf or hearing impaired, those in a quiet environment (such as on a train) or a loud environment (such as a bar) can now access the content easily. This means you can reach a wider audience, as well as ensuring your content is inclusive.
🎓 To aid learning: If your content is informational or educational, providing a typed transcript can help those who are visual learners and neurodiverse students who may be able to focus better when they have written text alongside the audio (such as some students with ADHD). Having content in a digital, typed form also supports note-taking, highlighting, and underlining, making studying much easier.
🔍 To create a searchable form of the content: Converting your audio file to text provides you with a searchable form of the content for record-keeping or to make research quicker. It’s not easy to search for key information within an audio file; you’d need to listen to the whole file to find the parts you need. Turning the audio into text allows you to perform automated searches for keywords, so you can quickly locate the quote or piece of information needed. This is ideal for businesses who need to generate transcripts of meetings for archiving, and for legal firms who need to search large amounts of audio data for key evidence.
✏️ To take notes when you can’t use a keyboard or pen: If you’re out and about, recording a voice memo you can convert to text later can be much more convenient. Recording verbal notes is also useful for people in professions where their hands are occupied, such as surgeons, lab workers, or machinery operators, and for people who need to log information in time-constrained situations, such as healthcare professionals. The voice recordings can be quickly converted to text to be used as needed.
👂 To translate contents or aid listening comprehension: For language learners and non-native speakers, having a typed transcript of the audio can enhance comprehension. For those who speak a different language, a written version of the contents allows the listener to use an online translation service to translate the contents into their own language. Often, voice-to-text tools are even able to interpret poor-quality audio, so they can help with understanding what was said when listening back to the recording.
📖 To consume the content in a different way: Even if the situation doesn’t dictate it, you may have a preference for how you consume content. Perhaps you want to convert your audiobook to text so you can read it on your e-reading device. Or maybe you want to convert a webinar to text so that you can scan the contents more quickly and just pick out the parts relevant to you. Converting audio to text with online transcription software provides you with more options and flexibility.
📈 To perform analytics on the content: If you have large volumes of audio data, converting it to a text form allows you to automate data analysis. For example, you could convert your business call centre recordings to transcripts, and then perform sentiment analysis or other forms of data analysis that wouldn’t be possible with the original audio files.
How do audio-to-text converters work?
Audio-to-text converters automate the process of transcribing speech into a digital text format. You no longer need to listen to the text and manually type out what was said or employ an expensive transcriptionist to do it for you. Instead, you can upload your audio file to be automatically processed into typed text. The conversion tools use a technology called automatic speech recognition (ASR), and innovations in the AI space have led to vast improvements in the accuracy of transcriptions over the last few years.
What is automatic speech recognition?
Also known as speech to text, automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a technology that can process audio recordings of human speech and translate them into a digital, typed format that can be read.
How does automatic speech recognition work?
Different ASR solutions use different methods, but most use the following steps:
- Speech input: This is the audio recording to be converted.
- Feature extraction: This is where the audio is processed to remove background noise and extract the useful audio sections.
- Decoding: Here acoustic models and language models are used to predict which sound is being said and to sequence these sounds into words, phrases and sentences based on context.
- Text output: This is the converted text file of the audio contents.
Other steps may also be included, such as language identification if the solution can process audio that’s in different languages.
As AI technology has advanced, ASR solutions have been able to incorporate AI and machine learning to improve the accuracy of transcriptions, making the results much more usable in real-life settings.
How to transcribe audio to text with Zamzar
1. Go to Zamzar’s audio-to-text conversion tool.
2. Add the audio files you want to convert. There are two different ways you can do this:
- Using drag and drop: Drag your files from your desktop or Finder/File Explorer window and drop them onto the webpage.
- Using the ‘Choose Files’ button: click the button, then select the files from your computer location, and click ‘Add’.
3. Once the file has been converted, click the blue ‘Download’ button to download the converted TXT (plain text) file to your computer. (To convert to DOC, DOCX or PDF instead of TXT, use the links listed below in the section ‘What formats can I convert with audio to text?)
What formats can I convert with audio to text?
You can convert several audio formats to TXT, DOC, DOCX and PDF formats. Here’s a full list of all the audio-to-text conversions we currently offer:
To TXT format (plain text):
To DOC format (Word):
To DOCX format (Word):
To PDF format:
What languages are supported with Zamzar’s audio file to text converter?
We support over 50 languages, including right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew, and ideographic languages like Chinese and Japanese. We also support multilingual files.
Top tips for audio-to-text transcription:
Although Zamzar’s audio-to-text transcription tool is able to convert even poorer-quality audio, taking the following steps will help ensure you get the best results:
- When recording your audio, minimise background noise to ensure the speech is as clear as possible
- Ensure a good speaker volume
- Avoid having music before the speech at the start of the audio file
What do other customers think of Zamzar’s audio-to-text converter?
Psst! A sneak peek at what’s coming soon for audio transcription
We’ll soon be adding more formats to our audio-to-text transcription service, so you’ll be able to convert your audio files to SRT and VTT (subtitle files), and TSV. Keep an eye on our blog and social media channels to be the first to know when they’re released!
To easily transcribe your audio into text, try the Zamzar audio-to-text converter today!
Happy converting!
[Cover photo by Videodeck.co]
