Record to word document

Transcribe is the ‘speech to text’ option in Microsoft Word. It lets you record live or upload an audio file and convert it into text.  Here’s a complete guide to using Transcribe and dealing with its annoyances.

Record a speech, lecture or meeting then later get a written transcript from an audio file.  Virtual meetings can be recorded and now that can become a written record as well.

In 2020, Transcribe was originally available in Word Online (aka Word for web) and later spread to OneNote for Windows. In February 2023, Transcribe appeared in Insiders releases of Word 365 for Windows.  It was promised to Office Mobile apps before the end of 2020 but hasn’t appeared yet. 

The limited availability isn’t a big problem. Make your transcription document with Word in a web browser then open the final document in any other Word software.

Update: Transcribe is now in OneNote for Windows and Word 365 for Windows.

Transcribe is mostly a cloud service and works the same for all apps.

• What you need
• Many Languages
• Uploading and converting to text
• Live recording
• Difference between Dictate and Transcribe recording
  • Dictate
  • Transcribe
• Editing a transcription
  • Fixing or editing transcript
  • Change all Speaker names.
  • Playback
  • Listen and edit
• Same speaker, over and over again
• Copying to Word document
  • Add all to document
• Transcript problems
  • Add section to document
• Reopening a document with a transcription
• Transcribe requirements and limitations
  • One Transcription per document
• Privacy

What you need

All you need to start is an audio file up to 200MB. Officially in .mp3 .m4a .mp4 or .wav format but we discovered Three extra audio formats that work with Microsoft 365’s Transcribe

The speech should be clear with little background noise or music to confuse the ‘speech to text’ system.

Transcribe can also record live, saving the audio file to OneDrive and offering a Word document of the text.

Start from Home tab, over on the right side under Dictate or microphone icon is now a Transcribe option.

If this is your first time with Dictate or Transcribe in Word Online you’ll be asked if the microphone can be connected to the browser.  Here’s the prompt in Chrome.  Choose ‘Allow’ to continue.

The Transcribe pane opens

Upload audio – use an existing audio file, officially in .mp3 .wav .mp4 or .m4a format. In practice, there are three extra audio formats that work with Microsoft 365’s Transcribe

Start recording – records audio using the default microphone.  That’s saved to your OneDrive account and converted to text.

At the bottom is a note about the number of transcription minutes used that month.

Many Languages

At the bottom of the Transcribe pane is a language selector. A wide range of languages and dialects are listed, far larger than the twenty-ish that Microsoft 365’s Dictate supports.

Here’s Microsoft’s list of supported languages.

Tip: Transcribe might be the workaround, if you’re frustrated with your language not being listed in Word/Outlook Dictate.

Uploading and converting to text

Click ‘Upload Audio’ and select the file to transcribe.

It’s strange that you can’t directly select an audio file on OneDrive.  It has to be saved or synced to the local computer then uploaded again for Transcribe. Audio files are automatically saved to OneDrive in the /Transcribed Files folder.

Then wait while the audio is uploaded and converted to text.

When it’s finished the recording and transcription text appears.

In this pane, there’s a lot more going on than first appears.   See ‘Editing a Transcription’ below.

Live recording

Clicking Start Recording then the mic icon turns on the default microphone. Start speaking and it’ll be recorded.

There’s a pause/record button available.

When you’re finished choose ‘Save and transcribe now’ to upload and convert the recording into text. See ‘Editing a Transcription’ below.

Difference between Dictate and Transcribe recording

At first, Dictate and Transcribe recording might seem the same.  They are similar but there’s important differences.

Dictate

Dictate is live real-time conversion of text of what you say.  Word and phrases appear in the document moments after you speak. 

Different speakers aren’t marked in any way.

There’s no pause option (though we wish there was). 

Voice commands like ‘New Paragraph’ work in Dictate.

What you say isn’t recorded for later playback.

Transcribe

Transcribe recording records your speech or meeting first.  Then it’s uploaded and converted to text once the recording is over.

Different speakers are noted under separate headings.

There’s a Pause button.

Voice commands don’t work.

The transcription can be edited in the Transcribe pane.

The entire recording is saved in your OneDrive /Transcribed Files folder.

Editing a transcription

The transcribed text appears in the Transcribe pane and might seem simple but there’s a lot of useful features hiding here.

We tested Transcribe with a recording of James Earl Jones and his ‘People will Come’ speech from the movie ‘Field of Dreams’.  Transcribe did a reasonable conversion job despite the music underlying the voices.

Fixing or editing transcript

Look for the pencil icon and click to edit a section of the transcript.

Now you can change the name from Speaker n  to a proper name. 

And fix up the transcribed text …

Just like any text in a browser, you can select it, right-click and see what browser options are available like Copy or Search.

Change all Speaker names.

If you choose the ‘Change all Speaker …’ option in Edit a section, the name will be changed all through the transcript.

A speaker’s name can be changed once or throughout the transcription.

Playback

At the top of the pane are the usual Play, Pause, Forward, Back and Volume buttons.

Forward and Back jump to the next section of the transcript.

Playback speed

The nice addition is the speed controller on the left.  Change the speed of playback from slow (half normal) up to twice normal to skip through the recording.

As you listen, the relevant part of the transcription is highlighted.

Listen and edit

Clicking on any time indicator will jump to that section of the recording.

If necessary, click the time stamp again to listen repeatedly and catch what was said.

Same speaker, over and over again

Transcribe makes separate sections for one speech. A single speech is broken up into (too many) separate sections.

It’s unclear if this is deliberate or a bug. Since it’s not been fixed for years, it appears to be deliberate .. Grrrr.

Perhaps the developers are ‘erring on the side of caution’ in case it’s not the same person talking?  Separating the transcription lets the customer change the speaker name.

There’s no way to join sections together to make a large spoken block.

Copying to Word document

There are various way to copy some or all of a transcript to the Word document.

Add all to document

Most obvious is the ‘Add all to document’ button at the bottom of the Transcribe pane with some choices:

• Just Text
• With Speakers
• With timestamps
• With Speakers and timestamps

The transcription is copied to the document looking very plain, which is the polite way to say it.

Or with timestamps it looks like this:

The ‘Audio file’ and ‘Transcript’ lines use Heading 1 style. The rest is all in Normal style.

Transcript problems

There’s nothing to separate speakers names from the spoken words.  It’s a shortsighted decision that makes it unnecessarily difficult to reformat the transcript.

Surely it would be better to use Heading 2 for speakers names?  Then users could easily reformat the naming either by changing the look of Heading 2 or Replacing that style with another (e.g. ‘Speaker Name’).

At the least, transcribed words should have a separate style (e.g. ‘Transcript’ or ‘Spoken’), even if the initial style settings are the same as Normal?  Ideally, each speakers words should be in a separate style (e.g.  ‘Speaker 1 text’ etc.). 

As Microsoft has done it, customers must manually go through the document reformatting it. Grrrr.

Question for Microsoft — What’s the point in having powerful and long-standing features in Word, if Microsoft itself won’t use them?

Add section to document

Or click the + icon to copy that section of transcript to the document.

Reopening a document with a transcription

Closing a document with a transcription, saves the document and the transcription.

If you reopen the document, go back to Home | Dictate | Transcribe.  The Transcribe pane will open with the transcription there.

The audio file needs to remain in the OneDrive /Transcribed Files folder with the same name. It’s not saved in the Word document.

Of course, that only works with Word that supports Transcribe.  Opening a transcribe document in another Word (like Word for Windows/Mac) can’t show the Transcribe pane (yet) but the transcription details are still in the .docx file.

Transcribe requirements and limitations

There are some requirements for Transcribe in Word:

• Microsoft 365 customers only – any plan, personal, education or corporate.
• Edge or Chrome browser for Word on the web.
• Many languages and dialects supported, see selector at bottom of Transcribe pane.
• Each uploaded file must be under 200MB.
• Audio formats: .wav .mp4 .m4a or .mp3.
  • Apple’s .aac format is accepted see Three extra audio formats that work with Microsoft 365’s Transcribe
• NO limit on the transcription time but Microsoft might impose a limit in the future.
  • There was a five hour limit – a total of 300 minutes of transcribing per month.
  • Look at the bottom of the Transcribe pane to see how much time has been used.

One Transcription per document

Only one audio file or recording can be saved in a Word document.

If you choose ‘New Transcription’ at the bottom of a current transcript, you’ll get this warning.

You can only store one transcript per document.
When you create a new transcript, the current transcript will be removed/deleted.

The workaround is to start a new Word document and do a separate Transcribe there.

This limitation appears to be linked to the way a transcription is saved within a Word document.

Transcripts can be copied between Word documents (just like any other text) to make a combined transcript document.  Or even link/embed the transcription documents into another Word doc.

Privacy

According to Microsoft:

Your audio files will be sent to Microsoft and used only to provide you with this service. When the transcription is done your audio and transcription results are not stored by our service.

As usual, those assurances don’t tell the whole story.

Audio files are automatically saved to OneDrive in the /Transcribed Files folder.  The transcribe text is normally saved to OneDrive, though that’s optional.  Anything saved to OneDrive is subject to intrusion by Microsoft.

Microsoft can be compelled to hand over any customer data to government agencies in accordance with local law. That can happen without a warrant or notice to the affected customer.

Three extra audio formats that work with Microsoft 365’s Transcribe
Turn talk into text in Word 365 for Windows
Read Aloud in Word 365 and 2019 in depth
Read Aloud in Word for Mac
The full story on Dictate with Office 2013 & Office 2016

Transcribing recordings is a demanding task. It takes sharp ears, keen eyes, and deep understanding. However, no matter how much you want to manually transcribe recordings, more likely than not, you won’t have enough time to do so, especially if you’re a busy student or employee. What you can do instead is to automatically transcribe your recordings. There are various methods and tools that can help you ease the process of transcribing recordings into a Word document. From add-ins to apps to free transcription services, these things can help you in your transcribing duties.

5 ways you can automatically transcribe recordings

Install add-ins on Microsoft Word

(Image source: Dual Writer)

There are s couple of add-ins you can install on Microsoft Word to help you easily transcribe recordings and speech while you work on your document. An example is Speech Tools. Speech Tools is a complete transcription solution that works on Microsoft 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016 running on Windows Vista, 7, 8 and Windows 10. Once installed, a new pane on Microsoft Word appears where you can play audio and video files, and use voice commands to control and listen to the recordings. To start transcribing, all you need to do is dictate the speech from the recording plus the appropriate punctuation. 

Try Voice Typing on Google Docs

Google Docs, Google’s free, cloud-based word processor has its very own audio-to-text software known as Voice Typing. Voice Typing allows you to speak (whether you’re repeating words from a recording or dictating your current thoughts), then it listens and transcribes everything you said into the document. This feature is fast, easy, and surprisingly accurate as it can correct misheard words right after you finish speaking a sentence, and knows the difference between usual homonyms such as “their” and “they’re”. 

To try out Voice Typing, open up a blank document on Google Docs, click “Tools” from the menu, and select “Voice Typing”. You can also use the shortcut Control+Shift+S. A button will appear on the left side of the screen where you can record and speak into your device’s microphone. As you speak, the tool will transcribe.

Use AIs or virtual assistants

Technological advancements made it possible for people to easily jot down notes and write thoughts. Now, you also have the choice to use AIs (artificial intelligence) or virtual assistants to help you transcribe. 

For iOS devices, there’s Siri. Siri can perform several tasks including solving basic math problems, checking the weather, remembering your parking location, and of course, transcribing speech. Android users, on the other hand, can use Google Assistant. Google Assistant is considered as one of the most advanced and dynamic virtual assistants out there. It’s capable of various things such as checking in to your flights, sending messages, translating from one language to another, and transcribing audio. 

Download transcription apps

There are also several transcription apps that are handy when it comes to impromptu writing sessions or transcription jobs. Some of the best transcriptions apps this 2019 are Dragon Anywhere, Speechnotes, Transcribe – Speech to Text, and Braina which recognizes most technical jargon. You can use these transcriptions apps to convert audio recordings to text and transfer them into your own Word document. 

Use a free transcription service

You can also use a free transcription service to help you automatically transcribe a recording. FreeTranscriptions, for example, is a free transcription service that uses the best online audio-to-text conversion engine to generate accurate machine transcripts. Uploading is easy and the transcribing process only takes minutes. After it transcribes your recordings, you can view an interactive digital version of your transcript, and you can choose to download it as a PDF file or as a Word document.

These five ways can be the solution to your worries. Try these and see which one can best help you in automatically transcribing into a Word document.

Similarily to my post regarding exporting records to MS Excel, below is some sample code that illustrates how one can export data into a new Word document (in a table structure). The code determines the necessary rows and columns based on the table or query passed to it and then does the rest. You can easily from this simple example get into formatting fonts, etc…

'---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
' Procedure : Export2DOC
' Author    : Daniel Pineault, CARDA Consultants Inc.
' Website   : http://www.cardaconsultants.com
' Purpose   : Export a recordset to a MS Word table in a new document
' Note      : Overwrites file if it already exists without any warning, so you may wish
'               to add a check prior to calling this function
' Copyright : The following is release as Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
'             (CC BY-SA 4.0) - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
' Req'd Refs: Uses Late Binding, none required
'
' Input Variables:
' ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
' sQuery        : Name of the Table or Query to Export the data from
' sFileName     : Path and Filename to save the Word Document as
' bOpenDocument : Leave the document open to the users or not (close after generating)
'
' Usage:
' ~~~~~~
' Export2DOC "Contacts", "C:Temptesting01.docx"
' Export2DOC "IncomingOrders", "C:Temporders.docx", True
'
' Revision History:
' Rev       Date(yyyy/mm/dd)        Description
' **************************************************************************************
' 1         2012-Apr-23             Initial Release
' 2         2020-04-08              Updated proc header
'                                   Added sFileName and bOpenDocument arguments
'                                   Added PageSetup.Orientation to proc
'                                   Fixed a bug in the table row count
'                                   Updated and expanded the error handler
'---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Function Export2DOC(sQuery As String, _
                    sFileName As String, _
                    Optional bOpenDocument As Boolean = False)
    Dim oWord                 As Object
    Dim oWordDoc              As Object
    Dim oWordTbl              As Object
    Dim bWordOpened           As Boolean
    Dim db                    As DAO.Database
    Dim rs                    As DAO.Recordset
    Dim iCols                 As Integer
    Dim iRecCount             As Integer
    Dim iFldCount             As Integer
    Dim i                     As Integer
    Dim j                     As Integer
    Const wdPrintView = 3
    Const wdWord9TableBehavior = 1
    Const wdAutoFitFixed = 0
    '    Const wdOrientPortrait = 0
    Const wdOrientLandscape = 1

    'Start Word
    On Error Resume Next
    Set oWord = GetObject("Word.Application")    'Bind to existing instance of Word

    If Err.Number <> 0 Then    'Could not get instance of Word, so create a new one
        Err.Clear
        On Error GoTo Error_Handler
        Set oWord = CreateObject("Word.application")
        bWordOpened = False
    Else    'Word was already running
        bWordOpened = True
    End If
    On Error GoTo Error_Handler
    oWord.Visible = False   'Keep Word hidden until we are done with our manipulation
    Set oWordDoc = oWord.Documents.Add   'Start a new document
    'Not strictly necessary, but for larger tables switching to Landscape can be very beneficial!
    '   so the next line demonstrates how that can easily be done
    oWordDoc.PageSetup.Orientation = wdOrientLandscape

    'Open our SQL Statement, Table, Query
    Set db = CurrentDb
    Set rs = db.OpenRecordset(sQuery, dbOpenSnapshot)
    With rs
        If .RecordCount <> 0 Then
            .MoveLast   'Ensure proper count
            iRecCount = .RecordCount    'Number of records returned by the table/query
            .MoveFirst
            iFldCount = .Fields.Count   'Number of fields/columns returned by the table/query

            'Switch to print preview mode (not req'd just a personal preference)
            oWord.ActiveWindow.View.Type = wdPrintView
            'Create the basic table
            oWord.ActiveDocument.Tables.Add oWord.selection.Range, _
                                            iRecCount + 1, _
                                            iFldCount, _
                                            wdWord9TableBehavior, _
                                            wdAutoFitFixed

            Set oWordTbl = oWordDoc.Tables(1)
            'Build our Header Row
            For i = 0 To iFldCount - 1
                oWordTbl.Cell(1, i + 1) = rs.Fields(i).Name
            Next i
            'Build our data rows
            For i = 1 To iRecCount
                For j = 0 To iFldCount - 1
                    oWordTbl.Cell(i + 1, j + 1) = Nz(rs.Fields(j).Value, "")
                Next j
                .MoveNext
            Next i
        Else
            MsgBox "There are no records returned by the specified queries/SQL statement.", _
                   vbCritical + vbOKOnly, "No data to generate an Word spreadsheet with"
            GoTo Error_Handler_Exit
        End If
    End With

    oWordDoc.SaveAs (sFileName)   'Save and close
    If bOpenDocument = False Then
        oWordDoc.Close

        '    Close Word if is wasn't originally running
        If bWordOpened = False Then
            oWord.Quit
        End If
    End If

Error_Handler_Exit:
    On Error Resume Next
    rs.Close
    Set rs = Nothing
    Set db = Nothing
    oWord.Visible = True   'Make Word visible to the user
    Set oWordTbl = Nothing
    Set oWordDoc = Nothing
    Set oWord = Nothing
    Exit Function

Error_Handler:
    If Err.Number = 5148 Then
        MsgBox "Your Table/Query contains a total of " & iFldCount & " fields/columns, but Word tables can only support a maximum of 63.  " & _
               "Please change your Table/Query to only supply a maximum of 63 fields/columns and try again.", _
               vbCritical Or vbOKOnly, "Operation Aborted"
    Else
        MsgBox "The following error has occurred" & vbCrLf & vbCrLf & _
               "Error Number: " & Err.Number & vbCrLf & _
               "Error Source: Export2DOC" & vbCrLf & _
               "Error Description: " & Err.Description & _
               Switch(Erl = 0, "", Erl <> 0, vbCrLf & "Line No: " & Erl) _
               , vbOKOnly + vbCritical, "An Error has Occurred!"
    End If
    Resume Error_Handler_Exit
End Function

You may also wish to review my MS Access Sample- Export Data to Excel and/or Word.