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How to Transcribe an Audio File to Text in Microsoft Word

Published on

Dec 9

Cristi Womack

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Transcribe from Audio file to text

How many times have you been in a meeting or recorded a video and need to have a transcription of said recording and didn’t want to hit play, listen, type; rewind, listen, type; rinse and repeat until you are finished with the recording. Then go back and fix your spelling mistakes or have to figure out where in the recording something was because you just didn’t hear correctly or misunderstood what was being discussed.

The transcribe feature only works for Word online.  I was able to use Edge and Firefox, but it didn’t work on my Chrome version (even though Microsoft said it would work on Edge and Chrome).  Need to do some research on that.  The moral of the story, if one browser doesn’t work, don’t fear, try another one.

The audio file needs to be in either .mp3, .m4a, .mp4 or .wav. 

The first thing we're going to do is go into a browser and open Office 365.

We're going to open a new blank Word document.

Click the drop-down button on dictate, click transcribe.

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Click on the upload audio button.

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Go find which audio we want to upload.

Click open.

It will run through and transcribe it.

And put it over on the right-hand side in the transcribe window.

Once the file has been rendered, you will see your transcribe bar with your regular play, playback speed, forward, reverse buttons.

And then it has your transcription of the audio file on the right-hand side.

At the bottom of the Transcribe section, you will click add to document and you will see options for just text, with speakers, timestamps, etc. We just want the text, so click “just text” option.

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It will take the transcribed data and put it in your actual Word document. 

Clean up the transcription if needed.  If you didn’t catch something you can click the Timestamp (blue hyperlink) in your transcribed section, and it will start playing from there.  

You could catch the meaning of the spoken words and put them into written words more easily.  Fix any typos or spelling or anything like that.

Then you can save the document and you have an Audio to Transcribed to a Word document. 

Easy peasy.


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