Transcription Software?

[Dreaming]

Hiya,

does anyone know of any free / shareware software to attempt to transcribe spoken word from an audio or video file into text? The reason I ask is at work we have about 30 youtube videos and adding subtitles to them all, and the boss wants proper full transcriptions too rather than just the subtitle files - but it's quite time consuming going through every single one and probably going to take a week or two to do them all. (as you need to keep playing them back as I can't write as fast as I can listen!)

Since its such a small batch there's little chance of getting proper software - its just not budgeted for at all - but if there was a freebie out there that people knew about, that would really save me a lot of work .

Cheers
Rich

[jim]

Don't know about transcription software, but if you're able to I'd highly recommend loading the videos/audio files into software that can play them back at slower speeds.

It's far easier to transcribe audio running at 0.5-0.7 speed or something, as compared to full speed, even if it does sound a bit odd.

[Dreaming]

Don't know about transcription software, but if you're able to I'd highly recommend loading the videos/audio files into software that can play them back at slower speeds.

It's far easier to transcribe audio running at 0.5-0.7 speed or something, as compared to full speed, even if it does sound a bit odd.

Yea I've done this before and it's worked quite well, but was just holding out for a nice easy method

[jim]

Fair enough

In fact, I just did have a couple of somewhat unhelpful thoughts regarding your quest for transcription software. The BBC have been using software like that for subtitles on programmes like Match of the Day over the past couple of years - my grandfather uses them - and they make some really ridiculous mistakes. Most of it's right, but they have a bad habit of fusing words together and turning them into something else. The reason I say is that I'm thinking that the BBC probably has enough money to get a very high-quality solution (considering that it's saving them having to employ somebody to do it), and it still doesn't work.

There is also transcription software built into Office 2007/Vista (I got both simultaneously so I'm not sure where it came from), which I used briefly for testing purposes, and is also useless. You could theoretically give it a go by installing Office 2007 (might require Vista, not sure), and then via the soundcard setting the audio input to repeat the audio output. Then you could play the video, and Word would read it as an input on the microphone, possibly turning it into some kind of text. I suspect, more likely, that it will just constantly say "I did not understand this word" and then you would have to pause the video, tell it what the word is, and start it again. It will probably be an unmitigated disaster .

I'd say it'd be quicker to do it yourself.