Step-by-Step Guide to Converting Audio to Text Using Apple and Audacity (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hey everyone this is Justin from Level Up Lunch. We're just getting ready to make a blog post on how to convert recorded audio to text. This screencast is not to focus on downloading and installing each one of the different components or the pieces that you need to do this. It's really going to focus on the settings and then kind of putting it all together and making it work. So let's see how we can do that. First we're going to go up to Apple system preferences and open up dictation and speech. And there's three different pieces we need to make sure that we've selected. First we need to turn dictation on. Next we need to look and have selected the use to enhance dictation. And then the third we need to select SoundFlower as an input device. Okay next we're going to close this down and then open up the Audacity. And Audacity has one setting that we need to change and that's the output device. So if we select SoundFlower the two channel it'll actually pipe the sound from the recording to dictation and then it'll go through the process of doing that. We already have a prior screencast that we're going to import and just show how that works. So I'll import that into Audacity. So we'll import that into Audacity. It'll take just a second and then we'll jump over to our text edit and then turn on dictation while it plays. This is where it gets a little trickier. You got to move a little bit faster. Once you play the recording you need to turn on dictation as soon as possible to pick up all of the other audio that's getting played. So we're going to make this jump here. We'll press play, jump over to text edit, hit our function key twice, and then it'll begin to actually transcribe that. That's one of the quirky things is you got to make that transition very quickly. Now you can see it's going over the audio and producing the text from that audio and as you could read through it and see that it's not always perfect. It'll get pretty good but then you'll have to go in and make edits to paragraphs and commas and punctuation and all that good stuff. The one thing to note too is once you move off of the text edit or your word editing program it will automatically stop dictation. So it's continuing to working here picking up the audio from Audacity but once I go over and say I click on another window it's already completed. So it'll stop that dictation. Let's go ahead and take a look at that. So it stopped it once I clicked on another window. So just be aware of that as you're doing your conversion or you have other things that you're working on during that conversion process. One thing I'll do is for this screencast I will convert a raw format so you can listen to the screencast as well as see what it dictation produced through this process. Thanks for joining.