- Here's how to transcribe audio to text. Whether you want to convert
audio, video, or speech-to-text, there's transcription tools and software that can automatically do it for you. We're gonna share the best
options, free and paid, so that you are covered
no matter your budget or your use case. Now, I'm gonna cover off quite
a few options in this video, so make sure you stick around to hear them all through to completion so that you know you're leaving here with the best option for you. Okay, the first ones we're
gonna look at are free and you already have
access to them right now. These are built onto your
computers and onto your phones and we can use those to
transcribe your speech-to-text. So, looking at Windows first, all you need to press on your keyboard is the Windows key and the letter H and that's gonna open up a voice typing. So, with this turned on in any text box, in any document, in any writing app, you can just start talking and it's gonna automatically
transcribe your voice into that application. And it does a pretty good job, this is something that's
had an overhaul on Windows fairly recently and now
it's definitely usable. It even supports punctuation
and paragraph control as well. So you can say things
like period or full stop and new paragraph and it's gonna automatically
add those in for you. If you're on a Mac, you've got
something almost identical, it's called Apple Dictation, you do need to enable it
first in the settings. So, you're gonna go over
to system preferences, click on keyboard, then over to dictation, and then you just have
to click on to enable it. Now, the default keyboard
shortcut to activate this is pressing control
twice on your keyboard, but you also have the
ability on that screen to customize up that shortcut too. And then just the same as on Windows, you can open up any text document, press that keyboard
shortcut of control twice, and then, you can just start speaking and it's going to automatically transcribe what you're saying. And again, it supports punctuation
and paragraphs as well. Over on your phone whether
you're on iOS or Android, this process here is exactly the same. Again, open up any
document or any text filled where you can type into. Down on the keyboard where that pops up, you can see a little microphone that will enable voice typing, so you wanna press on that and then when you start talking, it's going to automatically transcribe what it is you are saying. And all of these options
here are now really accurate and do work really well. It wasn't that long ago that these really weren't worth using. Now, you also have this functionality built into Google Docs and
also into Microsoft Word. So in Word, you just wanna make sure that you're on the home tab and then go across and
click on a dictation. You can then turn on
or off your microphone to start and stop the dictation. Just like the other examples,
it does a pretty good job. In Google Docs, you
just wanna go up the top to the tools menu down to voice typing and you have a little microphone pop up somewhere on your screen. To start and stop the dictation, you wanna hit that microphone. And as you can see, it
works really, really well. It actually comes up a lot faster than it does in Word. And in my experience, it's actually a little
bit more accurate too. So again, some great simple options that you've most likely got access to. Now if those aren't a fit for you so far, another great service,
which is totally free, no software to download and install, it's literally just a website that you can go to in Google Chrome. You will need to be using
Google Chrome for this one, but the website is dictation.io. This is a very simple tool that uses the Google speech recognition
technology or Google AI to create very accurate transcriptions from what it is you're saying. And really, this should
be almost identical to what you'd find using Google Docs as the back end of the
speech recognition technology should be the same. So when you head to the website, you wanna go to launch dictation, you can specify your
language up the top here, I'm gonna choose English Australian. And then all we need to get started is just press start, down the bottom here. You wanna allow access to your microphone and then you can just start talking and it's gonna automatically
start transcribing your text. And once again, you
can see that it's fast, it's accurate, and hey, it's free. And if we go back from here,
back to that main page, we can actually select voice commands. Then in here, we can see all the different speech recognition commands
that you've got access to when you're using this tool. And you can see that these are gonna work for a lot of different languages
other than English as well. So we can insert new paragraph, we can turn on and off listening mode, we can delete text that was typed and we can copy the text to our clipboard. And you can see in here
the common commands, the smileys or emojis and
things that you can add in. There's a ton of voice commands
that you can use in here. So, once you've finished
transcribing in this tool, you can see down the bottom, we've got a few different
options to get this out of here but the simplest one is
just to copy and paste it to where you want to go. Now, if you after something with more features and more controls, but you still wanna dictate or you still wanna transcribe
your text live in real-time, then Otter could be a great choice. And this one offers so much more than just the speech-to-text features. It's also a full meeting management and booking system as well, but it has the ability in there to automatically transcribe speech from multiple people in real-time and it will automatically detect the different people speaking. So, this makes it an
amazing tool for businesses or anyone looking to really dictate or transcribe their meetings in real-time. So, once you've created
an account and you log in, you can just got the top
right hand corner to record. Again, you wanna allow
access to your microphone and your speeches automatically
starting to transcribe, again, in real-time as you start talking or as it detects someone talking. And you can see straight away
here, the accuracy is great, the speed is fast, it
works really, really well. Now, this is something that I use a lot when I'm creating videos like this so that I don't need to
check what I've just said. I can literally glance across at my screen and I can see what it is I just said. But also if I made a mistake and I wanna work out where I can come back and pick up from when I'm recording, then I can just glance
across at this screen and I can see where I can
just start recording from. So as far as real-time transcribing,
I'm a big fan of Otter. Now, just this basic functionality alone is accessible in their free plan which is what I'm using
here for this example. But if you want the ability to upload your own video or
audio files to Otter as well and to access a lot of
the other meeting features and booking systems that are in there, then that's where you want
to jump on one of their pro, business, or enterprise plans. But it's awesome that you get free access to be able to record and transcribe live. Okay, so those are my top options if you're looking to transcribe your speech-to-text live or in real-time. But if you've already
got video or audio files that you want to transcribe,
then these are my top picks. Temi is a great option for a really fast AI
based transcribing service that costs 25 cents per minute to use. This, again, is something
that we've used quite a lot and the turnaround time is
usually less than five minutes but they do say the average
is five to 10 minutes on their website. I really love it in here though, you don't just have to do one video or one audio file at a time, you can actually do things in bulk. So if you've got a lot of files that you wanna transcribe fast, then that's where Temi is awesome. Now to get started, you just
need to create an account. You will need to add some
money to your account, this is a prepaid service. Then you can just come up
with the top to new order. Then you can drag and drop
your files onto this screen or you can copy and paste your URLs for any videos that are public online. It'll go ahead then and it'll
transcribe that video for you and we can just kind come over here to view transcript to
see the finished product. Now for this example, we can see that I uploaded a video here. I have the ability to play the video and you can see it highlights
the text in real-time of what I'm saying. And because this is done by AI, any areas where it wasn't 100% sure if that's exactly what I said, it's actually colored
those pieces in orange. So, it makes it really
easy to go through review, make any changes to the
text before you save it out, before you copy and
paste it, or download it. But in here, you also have the ability to remove any filler words from that transcript as well, just by selecting the little
box here under downloads. But what I also really love about Temi is there is no monthly fees, there are no subscriptions
or locking contracts. There is with a lot of
other options like this, you can prepay your credit, know that it's 25 cents per minute, and you can go through that as quickly or as slowly as you like depending on how much you're using it. The next option is Descript and this is one that
I am a massive fan of. Now Descript is, again, so much more than just
a voice to text tool. This one is actually a full
end to end editing system too for podcasts, for regular videos, and also for screen recording. Now in terms of the transcribing piece, once you sign up for a Descript account, download and install the
software on your computer, this one will work on both Mac and PC. You wanna create a new project and then you can just
drag and drop your video or audio file into the window there. Now we can see, it started
transcribing our video here straight away, this is a
short one minute video. We can preview the video over to the side and we've also got our audio wave forms down the bottom here, just as you'd see in a
normal video editing tool. Now, the overall
transcribing in here again is really accurate, it's really fast. And we can see that
we've got our text here over on the side now as if it was a Word
document or a Google Doc. And all of this is perfectly sync up with the video over here
on the right as well. So, if all we're after
is just the transcript and just the text, then we've got access
to all of that here now. So we could save that out, we
could copy and paste it out. We've got the text. But Descript has so much
more in there than just that. It actually gives you the ability to edit your videos down just as if it was a Word
document or a Google Doc. So, we can literally just select
some text here on the side, we can remove that text
pressing delete on the keyboard, and it's actually removed
that section from our video. Likewise, if I wanted to move, say this sentence down a little lower, I can right click on it
and I can cut that text and let's just say we're
gonna paste it here, I can right click, I can paste it. And not only has that moved the text, it's also moved the
corresponding video piece for that text as well. So Descript is one of my
favorite tools right now. I really think it is the
future of video editing where you can just do it from text, making it accessible to anyone. Now, we do have a
dedicated video on Descript which I will link up in the cards, covering off on a lot more of the features than we're going to in this video. Now, in terms of pricing,
there is a free option which gives you access to
three hours of transcribing and access to full audio and
video editing in there too. But to really unlock all
the advanced features and functionality in there, and that's where you wanna jump on the creator plan or the pro plan, which start at $12 a month or $24 a month, if you're paying annually. Now, all of the options
I've covered so far are AI transcribing which means that they
have a maximum accuracy of around 85 to 90%,
depending on the platform. If you're someone who's looking for higher level of
accuracy, 99% accuracy, and that's what you
don't wanna go past Rev. So Rev is another tool
that I'm a big fan of, we're personally been using for years with our YouTube channel. And we love Rev because of that accuracy, because it's not using an AI algorithm, it's actually using a real human to do the transcribing for you. Now, Rev does also have an AI
option very similar to Temi which is also 25 cents per minute. But if you are after the
highest level of accuracy, that 99%, then it's gonna
cost you 1.50 per minute for your transcribing, which
I still think is pretty cheap. You just wanna come up to the top corner and select place an order, you get to choose a transcription, which is what we're talking about, having an actual human do
the transcribing for you. Automated transcription
if you want the AI one. You can also do captions
and subtitles in here too. We're gonna go transcription. Again, you can upload directly to Rev, or you can paste in a URL
to a public video link. So we can see that once
our video is uploaded, it's gonna give us an estimate on how much this is going to cost, and it's gonna give us a few
other options in here too. So we have a one minute video, it says we can get it back in an hour, probably because it's so short, but we also have options
down here to rush my order to get it even faster. Time stamping, verbatim, and instant first drafts as well. So here's an example of
one of our YouTube videos that we had captions
made for inside of Rev. Once you're transcribing is done, it'll send you a notification, and you can come back in
and download the file. Now, another thing I really love about Rev is it has direct integration with YouTube, helping you create accurate captions and subtitles for your videos, which can help YouTube
understand your content, which can help your content
rank on the platform. But it also can help people
watch and consume your content if they've got captions enabled. And with the YouTube integration, when you link this to your
channel, you can come into Rev and it can actually pull videos directly from your channel to transcribe or to create those captions for you. And once they're created, it can automatically add them
back up to YouTube for you so that you don't need to do anything. Which is awesome. So this is something that we do for every one of our YouTube videos. Rev also supports translating
your videos and audio to other languages too. So it's not just transcribing,
it's translating too. And there's also direct
integration with Zoom for live audio transcribing
for your Zoom calls too. So again, in terms of
pricing, 1.50 per minute for the accurate transcribing or 25 cents per minute
for Rev's AI transcribing. So we've covered off a lot of options but there's one more that I want to give a quick mention to. These days, there are a
lot of video editing tools and applications that are starting to bring
in transcribing tools into the editing applications too. So this is something that
Adobe added to Premiere Pro not that long ago and there's lots of others as well. So again, depending on your workflow and how you're specifically looking to convert speech-to-text or convert your video
or audio files to text, if it works for your workflow, you might find that your
video editing application might already have this built in as well. So, it's definitely worth a Google search for your editing tool and transcribe to see what shows up. But those are my top methods right now for converting video,
audio, or speech-to-text. Let me know down in the comments which one do you think is
the best option for you or what do you think I've missed? Also, check out the
video linked on screen, I have no idea what it is. This one is a recommendation from YouTube for you, specifically. I hope it's good. I'll see you in the next one.
