Tool Tip: Using Microsoft Office 365 for Audio Transcription

When I was writing my dissertation, I paid a court reporter to transcribe my interviews. I don’t remember now how much I paid her, but I can assure you it was worth every penny. One of my committee members offered to lend me the pedal attachment for the digital recorder that made the starting, stopping, and rewinding required for transcription easier. She was of the mindset that good qualitative research demanded that you do your own transcriptions, that transcription gave you a better understanding of your data. Maybe she’s right. I’ll never know.

What I knew at the time was this:

• I was working full-time while writing my dissertation. I had worked full-time throughout my entire doctoral program.

• I had a child under 2.

• I am not very coordinated, and that pedal thing scared me.

• I agreed with the colleague who told me the best dissertation was a done dissertation.

So, I outsourced that part of the work, and I have never regretted it.

In the last year or two, I have found myself needing to transcribe audio again. Maybe, to provide a transcript for a video lecture. More recently, I was writing a book chapter on the national influence of the first-year seminar at the University of South Carolina, and I conducted several interviews with key players in the course’s administration over the last 50 years. I wanted transcriptions of those interviews to be able to look for themes, pull direct quotes, etc. I also thought the interviews were good archival material. I began looking around for an easy, low-cost option for converting those audio files to text.

Enter Microsoft Office 365. If you are using the desktop version of Word (I’m on Word for Mac Version 16), you have the option to dictate your text. But in the online version of Word, you can also upload an audio file and have Word create a transcript for you.

In 2 clicks and about 10 minutes, you can transcribe about an hour's worth of audio.

The process is wonderfully easy. Begin by opening a new document in Word and selecting Transcribe under the Dictate menu (the microphone icon). Then, upload your audio file, and let the magic happen. Most of my audio files have been around an hour or less; it typically takes less than 10 minutes for the transcript to pop up on screen. The quality is generally good, though as with any voice-capturing technology, it isn’t perfect.

I usually read through the transcript and fix obvious problems or take out the extra (huh’s). If I want an especially clean transcript, I can playback the audio and clean as I go. That process can be time-consuming, but it is less so than transcribing the audio in the first place.

The transcript includes a couple of features I have found really helpful:

Speaker designations (Speaker 1, Speaker 2, etc.). I usually do a find and replace to add names of actual speakers for my own benefit.

Time stamps. These are really useful if you find that the transcript isn’t accurate or hasn’t fully captured something, as it helps you find that point in the recording more easily. I suspect the timestamps may also be useful if you were trying to create captions for a video.

The transcription feature is included in the Microsoft 365 subscription, but it does have a few limitations. For now, it only transcribes English-language audio. You are also limited on the number of hours of uploaded audio that can be transcribed per month. Currently, the limit is 5 hours. If you anticipate needing to transcribe more audio than that, you may need to look to another service. But for occasional use, I have found this to be a terrific time-saver. And while I have proven my willingness to pay for transcription services in the past, I am just as happy not to.