Speaker 1: You have an audio or a video and you're wondering how to go about transcribing it. So there are three ways that people actually transcribe or convert audio or video into text. And number one is transcribing manually. Transcribing manually is actually listening to the audio yourself and typing everything that is being said. If Tess said this, you pause the video, you type what Tess said. John said this, you pause the video and type what John says. That is what you call doing manual transcription, actually transcribing from scratch everything. When people hear of transcribing from scratch, they usually think, okay, so now I have to open my audio player, whether it's VLC and then open my text document, whether it's Word. And then now I have to play the audio on VLC and then I pause it and then I go to Word and then I type it. But that's not actually what happens. What happens is that when you're doing manual transcription, we have transcription tools that actually make this work easier. In transcription, we have a software or a tool called Express Scribe. This software makes transcription easy in that it gives you an environment where you can actually upload or rather load the video or the audio you're trying to transcribe. And now there's also a part where you can actually type what you're hearing. And it also has hotkeys. Express Scribe makes your work very, very easy. In that on top of you having hotkeys where you can easily pause, play, rewind or forward your audio, you can also increase the speed or reduce the speed of the audio for you to actually transcribe better. So this is the beauty of such tools in that you don't have to be transcribing on a different software and then listening to your video or audio on a different software. Express Scribe can easily be downloaded from NCH. You just download and install it the way you actually download and install your VLC or whatever software you have on your laptop. There are two versions, the paid version and the free version. The paid version is for commercial purposes. And if you'll be using it for non-commercial purposes, then you can use the free version, which is what I use. Another tool or software that you can use when transcribing from scratch or transcribing manually is a software called Listen & Write. And like Express Scribe, Listen & Write is totally free. And it also comes with all those features that Express Scribe has. You can pause your video, you can rewind, you can forward, you can increase or reduce your speed. So these two softwares, which I will link down below in the description box, they usually make you work very easy when it comes to transcribing from scratch. They give you an environment where you can just listen to the audio while typing at the same time. You can quickly pause, you can quickly play your video, you can quickly rewind and forward. If transcribing from scratch doesn't sound attractive to you, then the second method that you can use is voice to text software. The two most common voice to text options are one, Otter.ai. Now Otter gives you 600 free minutes where you can speak onto the microphone and whatever you're saying is being transcribed for you for free. And it gives you this 600 free minutes every month. If you exhaust your 600 minutes in that month, that means you have to pay for extra. This is how it works. Let's say you have a 60 minutes audio. So you can either play that audio next to your Otter.ai voice to text, like next to the microphone. Or if the audio is not clear enough, then you can just listen to it and then repeat what is in the audio to your microphone. The second voice to text option, which is absolutely free by the way, is Google Voice Typing. And Google Voice Typing works exactly the same as Otter.ai, except now you have to access it when you're using Google Docs. So open your Google Docs, go to tools, choose voice typing and speak into the microphone and whatever you're saying will be transcribed for you. It's that easy. And it's absolutely free. If using voice to text does not sound attractive to you, there's a third option. The third method you can use to convert your audio or video to text is by using automatic transcription softwares. So what happens for automatic transcription softwares is you just upload your audio or your video, then they will generate the transcript for you. This is the fastest and the easiest way to convert your audio or your video to text. And there are so many automatic transcription softwares out there, but I actually haven't seen one that is absolutely free. All of them come with a trial version or a few trials, but then eventually you'll have to pay for them or find loopholes to use them for free. There are so many of them, but here are some of the common ones. There's Otter.ai, which gives you three free uploads per month. So you can upload three audios, which will then transcribe for you automatically for free. There's also Temi, which gives you one trial. Like you can only upload one audio just to test the software and see how it works and see whether you can actually pay for it. And there's Trint. There are so many others out there. If you just Google automatic transcription softwares, I can assure you you'll get a whole list. You won't even exist there. That is how you convert audio or video to text. And kindly note that voice to text and automatic transcription softwares are not a hundred percent accurate. That means if you use them, if you use voice to text, you'll have to do some editing yourself. Sometimes you say the word test and it hears test, so it will type test. So it's up to you to go and proofread. The same thing happens with automatic transcription softwares. You have to go through the generated transcript and proofread it and change what has been written wrongly or remove what is there and should not be there and add what has been omitted. So these are not foolproof ways of transcribing, but they make work easier and they speed up the transcription process. Now the most surest, the surest way for me is number one, that is transcribing from scratch because this one, it's you who's transcribing. So it's unlikely that you'll make so many mistakes. The mistakes that maybe automatic transcription software like Oita or Google voice typing will make. You can choose to use all the methods or one or two, depending on the kind of files you have or the kind of work you have. But remember, whichever you choose quality is the most important thing when it comes to transcription. Put quality first.