How to Transcribe Audio to Text in Microsoft Word Using Dictate Feature (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Okay, you're in Microsoft Word and you want to convert an audio file to text. Now to do this, go to the Home tab on your ribbon and then over to the Dictate menu. If you click on that, you'll see an option named Transcribe. Click on that. So at the top here, it lists the supported audio file types. So that includes video files and audio files. What you next need to do is select your language. So I've got English, United Kingdom selected by default, but obviously you can choose your particular language. And then all you have to do is click on this Upload button and navigate to the file that you want to transcribe. So here's my audio file. Click on Open and it will upload that file to OneDrive. So this audio is from a video tutorial that I've recently created on Windows 11. And you can see here that it's given me these timestamps and then the associated text. So if you have more than one speaker in your audio, it will try and differentiate between the speakers and give them different speaker names. Speaker 1, Speaker 2, Speaker 3. You can change these speaker names by clicking on this little pencil button. So I'm going to say this is Chester. And I want to change all Speaker 1 labels to Chester. And then I click on this Confirm button and it changes all of the Speaker 1s to Chester. If you have more than one speaker, then you'd need to do that for each individual speaker. Now, if I wanted to add all of this text to my document, all I'd need to do is go down to this Add to Document button. And I can either just add the text, so it would appear as one paragraph. I'll delete this. I can also say that I want to add the text with the speakers. So there's only one speaker and that's me. Let me delete that. Or I can say add it with timestamps or with speakers and timestamps. So let's see what speakers and timestamps looks like. Your other option is to add individual sections of text to the document. You can do that by clicking on this little plus button. The text appears with the timestamp and the speaker name. So I can do that for each individual section of text. Now, obviously, once the text is in the document, you can go ahead and edit it. So for example, this was really one sentence. Now, your other option is to edit the text over here in the transcribe task pane. And you can do that by just clicking on this little pencil button. And you can make any changes you want to within this box. So what I might do is take this text out of this box, cut it, confirm, and then put it in this one. Because it's really part of the same sentence. So you can either do the editing over here or once it's in the document itself. Now, if you want to double check that this text is actually correct, or you're seeing words in the text that you don't recognize, then you can always play back your audio. Okay, you're in Windows 11 and you want to stop apps running in the background. I'll show you how to do that. Now, what's quite nice is it does give a lighter background to the part of the text, the original text, that you're editing. to the part of the text, the audio is playing back audio for. So if I move on a little bit, you can see that that lighter background starts to move down through these timestamps. So for example, I've moved down to this timestamp now. And if I play, it plays that text. Now, it's not perfect when it does that. For example, that started the text halfway through the sentence, but it's quite a good way of navigating between these timestamps. Okay, that's all I wanted to cover in this particular video. Hopefully that's useful. If it is, please give me a thumbs up and subscribe. And I'll see you next video.