How to Turn Audio into Text: Best Free & Cheap Converters
A product by IBM, Watson’s Speech to Text, can transcribe audio files to text for free. The tool is easy to use, and you can access it from your web browser. It means that you don’t have to install a transcription program on your PC for conversions, and you can process transcriptions on Windows, Mac. You’re able to share audio and text files to other iOS apps too, and when it comes to organizing them, you can view recordings in a comprehensive file. The app is available on iOS devices for $4.99. (i) Method-1: Best Free Way To Transcribe Audio and Video Files To Text (ii) Method-2: Transcribe Audio Files to Text Using “Dragon Naturally Speaking” Software If you have not read and watch, Click on above link to get it now. In this article, we will tell you the Method No. 3 – Transcribe An Audio File to Text Using Online Tools.
Last time when I interviewed our guest Chris Pirillo, I needed an app that could convert an audio file with his speech into a text document. Frankly speaking, I wanted to save my time instead of boring typing each word that he had pronounced. So I surfed the Internet carefully and came across several good apps which could convert audio files (in MP3, WMA or M4A formats) into text docs automatically. Now I’m happy to share them with you.
- It was previously meant to just record the audio notes like meeting notes or lectures but it now it can even turn the audiofiles to text. The app will save both the text & audio files together so that it’s easier for you to find out your recorded note. Free Mac Audio to Text Translator Software – MAXQDA.
- Convert audio files to text using this free service. I'm always interested in file conversion services, and I've often written on these pages about how to convert between Word, PDF, Excel and so on. But here's something a little different, and very clever.
1. VoiceBase
UPD: Voicebase used to be the best voice to text solution for many years. Unfortunately, since 2019 it’s no longer a free audio to text conveter. Now it provides API for audio transcription and speech analytics on the paid basis. So you’d better skip the part about Voicebase and try the tools below.
VoiceBase is an online voice to text transcription service for companies and individuals. Though, it mainly focuses on business clients, an ordinary user, like you and me, can convert a voice recording into a text file for free at VoiceBase. As for January 2016, each new user is granted a free account with $60 credit and up to 50 hours of audio storage. It costs about $0.01 to transcribe 10 second speech. VoiceBase uses smart voice recognition technology, so the quality of its machine audio transcript is high.
Obviously, the final text quality depends on original sound track and the speaker’s accent. VoiceBase understands US English pronunciation seamlessly. If a person speaks clearly, then the text is close to manually written. If an interviewer mumbles or lisps, then you’ll have to review the transcript or hire someone for text checkup. Fortunately, you can order human transcript right in your VoiceBase account. Moreover, you can turn video into text!
SEE ALSO: 200+ Useful Resources & Tools for Teachers & Students
This audio to text converter understands English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish (including Latin American version). In fact, VoiceBase is remarkable for quick and easy speech to text conversion. The website interface is clear and you smoothly go step by step:
- Go to www.voicebase.com and click the green Upload a file button in the middle of the screen.
- Create a free VoiceBase account. Provide your name, email address and click the Sign Up button. You have to confirm your account via email to get access to VoiceBase.
- Click the green Upload button at the top right corner.
- Add an audio or a video file of a supported format. If needed, to join video or audio parts together. Name your file, add a description, select the Machine Transcription, and a file sharing type (Private or Public).
Tip: use Audio Converter by Freemake to make a supported audio file for VoiceBase. - Your file will be processed and you’ll be notified by email when it’s ready. Later, you can find the file at the My Content tab. For example, I’ve added a 10 minute audio interview in M4A format and it took about 15 minutes to convert it into a text file.
- When the text file is done, go to My Content tab in your VoiceBase account and click on the name of your file.
- Check the Machine Transcript box right under your audio file.
- Copy the transcript and save it as text document.
Summary: VoiceBase is a fast online audio to text converter. Needless to say, it is suitable for everyone no matter what you need: an automatic or human speech to document conversion.
2. Dragon Dictation
Definitely, you may try another voice-to-text converter: Dragon Dictation. We dedicated a special article to it. In a few words, Dragon Dictation is completely different from VoiceBase. It pretends to be a universal speech recognition tool for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and other platforms. Please note that the desktop version is paid ($75-150 for home users, $300 for enterprises), while the mobile apps are free for US & Canada. Download update imovie mac free.
Like Apple’s Siri, Dragon Dictation is capable of understanding what you say to it. However, the main focus of the app is to memorize your speech notes as a piece of text. It is easy to create documents of any length and edit, format and share them directly from your mobile device. Dragon can handle specialized industry vocabulary, and it comes with excellent features, such as the ability to transcribe text from an audio file you upload.
To do this, follow the steps:
- Open the software. From the DragonBar, select Tools>Transcribe Audio>Transcribe Recording.
- Click Select the speaker and select who the voice in the recording belongs to – Me or Someone else.
- In the Input audio file field, enter the file name of the recording and the directory path where it’s located, or click Browse to navigate to it.
In the Output text file field, enter a file name for the transcribed output file and enter the directory path where you want to save it. - Optionally deselect Automatically add commas and periods if you do not want Dragon to add this punctuation to the transcription, as the accuracy may degrade when this option is selected.
- Then follow the transcription wizard, it will prompt you to choose what you want to do next. Select the needed options and click Done.
Summary: Dragon Dictaion is much more than a simple audio to text converter. You should invest into it only if you’re sure to use dictation options on the regular basis. For occasional uses, it’s advisable to try a free program from the ones listed below.
3. Sonix.ai
Sonix.ai is an online app to trascribe audio. The free trial includes 30 minutes of free audio to text conversion. I think it’s enough for an occasional use. The developers provide a complete access to all the features with no credit card required. The only thing you need is to sign up, you may do this with your Google account just in one click. The premium account isn’t expensive (from $11.25 per month).
To convert a speech file into Word document, follow the steps:
- Drag and drop the audio (or video!) file into the browser window from your PC or choose the required file from your Dropbox or Google Drive.
- While the file is being uploaded, choose the language spoken. Click the big blue button below.
- Reply a few questions about the quality of the audio file (about background noise, etc.). Press Continue trascribing.
- Wait a bit while the text file is being prepared. After that, you may review and edit the text.
- Download the Word file to your PC, share online or save to your Google Drive.
Summary: Sonix.ai is brilliant for rare audio transcriptions. It provides a decent text quality and is not overloaded with feature. Definitely, a must have for picky users.
4. Inqscribe
Inqscribe is a transcription software for Windows, Mac OS. You can use it free with no license (with limited features) or instantly unlock all the features by purchasing a paid license ($99) or by requesting a 14-day trial.
Apart from audio files, you can also transcribe long video files including full-length movies, there is no time limit in all version. However, with a free one you won’t be able to save and download the resulted text file. Still you may copy the text to the clipboard.
The tool works in the same way as all the above mentioned. You need to add a multimedia file, choose a language and launch the audio to text conversion. InqScribe transcripts contain embedded timecodes that allow instant access to arbitrary times within the media file.
SEE ALSO: 5 Easiest Ways to Add Captions to Video Free and Fast
InqScribe also features a flexible editing environment, QuickTime and Windows Media support, customizable keyboard shortcuts for controlling media playback and inserting repetitive text, and a range of import and export options available in the paid version.
![Best Free Audio To Text App Mac Best Free Audio To Text App Mac](/uploads/1/3/4/1/134136238/618787064.jpg)
Summary: InqScribe is like a Swiss knife for creating captions and subtitles. You should try the evaluation version if you need to precisely transcribe a long video with further media export.
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Remember the horror stories from the days of Windows XP speech recognition? It was a mess, however, with the rise of AI and machine learning, speech-to-text (not text to speech) transcription has become more reliable and efficient than ever. There are plenty of speech to text apps which do that in real-time but what if you want to transcribe voice recording to text? I’ve made a list of the best solutions to convert voice recordings to text on your mobile, web browser and PC. Let’s check them out.
To test the accuracy of the following software we will use first one minute recording of this YouTube video.
Convert your Voice Recordings to Text
1. Transcribe
Transcribe transcribes both video and audio recording into text. While the app is free, it monetizes transcription time on an hourly basis. Compared to the higher-end options in this list such as Happyscribe, rates are quite reasonable at just $4.99. The developer doesn’t specify if they’re using a speech-to-text API like Google Cloud Input or a custom solution.
Read: Best TTS software for Mac
The app gave a clear output with punctuation missing here and there. It had trouble only with the words which either not clear or were a little distorted. Either way, the app still outputs the closest word and scores the transcription itself. Nevertheless, the output is great, a clear step up from free solutions like Bear Converter, and at $4.99 per hour of transcription, it’s not going to break the bank.
Accuracy: 96%
Install Transcribe (iOS)
2. Otter.AI
Otter is a great transcription app for students and helps them in easing the tedious task of transcribing notes. Not just Students, it is equally popular among professionals who use it to transcribe the minutes of meetings and conferences. Even though it is intended for transcribing on the fly, you can still upload a voice recording from the local storage and transcribe the audio file. All the transcription happens on the cloud and you get two variants of the script. The first draft is the quick transcription generated within seconds and may contain errors, however, the audio is processed again on the cloud and significantly improves the transcript accuracy. The app is free and available for both Android and iOS, you can transcribe up to 600 minutes.
Related: Best OCR Apps for iPhone
During my testing, I found the app is still very accurate and got all the words right, it still struggled with punctuations. It also couldn’t identify any paragraph changes but that is not a big deal as I can just edit the script afterward anyway.
Install Otter (Android | iOS) https://interiorsrenew805.weebly.com/blog/motion-camera-app-mac.
3. Happyscribe
Happyscribe is the first online option on this list. It’s a paid offering that’s targeted squarely at professionals, including journalists—and the pricing definitely shows this: Happyscribe’s pay as you go plan costs 12 Euros per hour. For that kind of money, there’s got to be a meaningful payoff. This comes in the form of Happyscribe’s highly advanced machine learning algorithm—what it uses to identify and transcribe speech. Happyscribe’s algorithm is advanced enough to recognize multiple different speakers—it makes the second-pass process faster by offering a heatmap mode that shows you exactly where in the transcript its algorithm struggled. You get a wide range of file export options, too, from Word docs and plain text files to timestamped SRTs.
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It showed incredible results and got almost all the words right, it even detected the paragraph changes which is great if you have multiple speakers in a conversation. Happyscribe does have a free trial that gives you access to 30 minutes of transcription. All in all, if you’re looking for the best-in-class online audio-to-text solution, Happyscribe is a great option.
Convert Audio To Text Mac
Accuracy: 99%
Check out Happyscribe
4. Sonix
Sonix is very similar to Happyscribe and is aimed towards the same kind of target market—business users who want a reliable, AI-based transcription solution that actually gets the job done, though at a fraction of the cost of human transcription. Sonix’s pricing reflects this: You’re looking at an $11.25 per month subscription for a single-user license on top of $6.00 per hour rate for recordings. If you’re looking to handle large volume, this makes it more competitive than Happyscribe but the latter wins out for smaller volume use-cases. Sonix also has a free 30-minute trial, though you’ll have to enter your credit/debit card information in order to access it. We tried it out and were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the transcription.
Read: This is the best Transcription software for Mac
Just like with Hyperscribe, Sonix showed extremely good results. Not a single word was incorrectly transcribed. Another point to note is that Sonix took noticeably less time to finish transcribing than Happyscribe.
Best Free Audio To Text App Mac Os
Check out Sonix
5. Bear File Converter
2a esp8266__iot_sdk_user_manual. Professional transcription software can be expensive! Even if you’re missing out on industry-best transcription, free alternatives are preferable if your budget is, well, zero. We tried out Bear converter as a free option. This is a multimedia converter that allows you to convert just about any type of file into any other and it incidentally has an MP3 to TXT converter that uses Baidu’s speech recognition engine.
While the Baidu recognition wasn’t perfect, it correctly transcribed approximately 70 percent of the speech. Not bad for a media converter that isn’t even advertised as transcription software! There’s a 3MB cap on audio files for transcription. You could drop the file size by re-encoding to a lower bitrate but that could just make recognition worse.
Accuracy: 70%
Check out Bear File Converter
6. Sobolsoft MP3 to Text Converter
Sobolsoft has over 1500 apps and audio transcription is just one of them. The Sobolsoft Speech to Text converter requires a bit more setup than most. You need an IBM Speech to Text API key to make it work. Watson’s speech to text gives you 100 minutes of transcription for free per month after which it’s priced at a per-minute rate. Sobolsoft itself has a free version and a $19.99 paid version. Apart from a nag screen, I didn’t notice any significant difference when using the free version.
The test results are obvious when you bring IBM’s Watson in the picture. However, the results were not better than some of the more advanced apps above like Happyscribe and Otter. It didn’t recognize any punctuations or paragraph changes.
Accuracy: 93%
Check out Sobol Mp3 to Text Converter
Closing Words
These were my picks for best apps to convert voice recordings to text. Otter and Transcribe are the best solutions for mobile users. Sonix is cheaper than Hyperscribe if you are going to transcribe more. Sobolsoft MP3 to Text is kind of outdated but it is still fresh and strong in the bones. What apps do you like the best in this list or if you have a better solution then let me know in the comments below?
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