Speaker 1: Hi everyone. Welcome to another Journalist Toolbox training. I'm Mike Reilly, the founder and editor of the Journalist Toolbox. And today we're going to talk about transcription tools. Transcription tools are absolutely wonderful for reporters. It allows us to be able to transcribe audio very quickly without having to sit down and type it all out, which is, for those of us who've been working in the industry a long time, I know isn't a lot of fun. I'm going to show you a bunch of different types of tools to do so, and then demo one of them just so you can see how easy it is to use. If you're looking for transcription tools, I have several of them on my website, journalisttoolbox.org. It's hosted by the Society of Professional Journalists. This is the Journalist Toolbox website. Right now I've got transcription tools over here on the right rail. Oftentimes you'll find it out here in kind of the main area. But if you click on that, it'll take you to the transcription page. It's got everything from Microsoft Word transcription tools to Google transcription tools. Otter.ai, which I'll show you in just a minute, it's one of the better ones, kind of the Ferrari of transcription tools. Most of these tools are free. There are some paid ones or paid services that will charge $12 an hour, $0.10 a minute, or $0.10 a word, that type of thing. And it can get very pricey very quickly. So there's plenty of free ones on here that I would encourage you to use before moving on to a paid version of a transcription tool. So again, the transcription tools page on Journalist Toolbox will show you all kinds of different transcription tools. And all these links are also listed at the bottom of our description in our YouTube video right here. Otter.ai is a great transcription tool. The free version, which I have right here, allows you to record or import audio right into it. It gives you 603 minutes to record and transcribe with. They also have a pro version and a business version. The pro version offers a student teacher discount. It's pretty easy to find a promo code to get a little price break. It gives you 6,000 minutes. So maybe if you have a newsroom that's using this tool quite a bit. It also allows you to sync from Dropbox, has many other features in there too, as well as custom vocabulary if you're using a lot of medical terms or legal terms. The custom vocabulary feature can really help with transcription and clean it up. The business version has all kinds of added security and other features with it. But if you're just transcribing some kind of day-to-day interviews, I would suggest just using the free version of it and either record or import. It'll take WAV files, MP3 files, all kinds of different file formats. Another tool that you can use to transcribe is Google Docs. Google Docs will now allow you to use voice typing. And here's a little hack. If you want to open a new Google Doc, you don't have to go to Google Drive to do it. Just type in docs.new, D-O-C-S dot new. And once you do, it'll give you your basic documents interface. Go to the tools section here. And they just added this in not long ago. Voice typing. Click to speak. It'll do it in several languages as well. And once you start speaking into it, it'll also record if you're recording a phone call, Skype interview, a Zoom interview, that type of thing. It'll start to transcribe what you're saying into the microphone. Again, describe, transcribe. It does make some mistakes here. So you do have to go back and clean up the audio pretty quickly after you're done. Pay close attention if you're interviewing someone and relying on the transcribing as you go. I always encourage people to take notes. Maybe have a backup recorder as well just so they have the raw audio. But this can be a good quick and dirty way if you just need to get a few quick quotes from somebody for a story to pick it up very, very quickly. Again, it'll mess up on things like T-W-O, T-O-O, T-O. I talk very quickly and kind of doing that on purpose right now just to test this out. I've been doing testing on this for about a week or two. And it works pretty well. So I've been happy with the results so far. But if you're interviewing somebody maybe that has a thick accent or piles sentences on top of each other like I do, it can really be a challenge with the transcription here. Just click the microphone when you're done. And now you have your transcription already in Google Docs, which is quite nice. Google Pinpoint is another tool. I've got a link to it right down here that allows you to load an audio file into it and get a transcription with a time code in it, which is really nice. You just load the MP3 or WAV file into it and Pinpoint will give you the transcription pretty quickly. You just load it in and sit there and wait for it to play through. It'll give you a PDF of it within just a few minutes. So those are a few options there. Otter.ai, again, I mentioned is kind of the Ferrari. Google Docs for quick and dirty and Google Pinpoint, you know, if you've got a larger audio file that you need to use. So that's all we had for now. Hope all is well with you. Take care and stay safe and we'll see you soon.