Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle

"I am looking for a voice recognition to text program for transcribing the audio in my interviews. Got any ideas ?"

In my own experience, attempting to use software to transcribe audio recordings has met with mixed results. If there's a large amount of industry specific jargon used, the software fails miserably, leaving you spending more time cleaning up files than you would have simply by transcribing the audio the old fashioned way. A better result is to send your audio files to a transcription service like CastingWords.com. The quality is generally outstanding and the turnaround time is generally faster than most of us could do it ourselves. If you do insist on attempting to transcribe your audio using software, here are a few tips.

First tip: Get Dragon Naturally Speaking. No voice to text software is perfect, but it is by far the best option.

After installing the software, spend some time training it to understand some of your more complex words. If there's a ton of jargon in your interview, do some correction in the software to make it understand. An hour spent up front may save you eight hours of fixing mistakes later.

Use an external microphone rather than an internal one. If your computer is a notebook with built-in microphone, the performance of the recording will be improved by attaching an external microphone and pointing it at your speakers. You may have to adjust both the microphone sensitivity and the volume of the audio playback to achieve an optimal result.

An optional approach is to listen to the audio in headphones and repeat it through your microphone to the computer. This takes a little longer than just pressing play, but the quality tends to be closer to normal speech to text performance.