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Audio to Text: How to Turn Recordings Into Edit-Ready Text

By November 12, 2018September 1st, 2022No Comments

For professionals, amateurs, and everyday users of audio and video files alike, audio to text transcriptions can be absolutely critical. Having accurate transcripts of your recordings on-hand is the best way to maintain a complete account of the content without having to sift through hours and hours of footage or audio.

So, what do you do? Whip out the computer and start watching or listening while typing it all out, right? Unfortunately, it’s never that simple. However long it would take to capture all of these important recordings, it would be exponentially longer to transcribe audio to text by hand. Additionally, you’ll more than likely miss some key details and phrasing that can be key to the context.

As technology and expert-level transcriptionists have become more advanced over recent years, audio to text services are more affordable and effective than ever. You can receive specialized audio to text services for any project in any field, including:

One of the widest-reaching industry-specific services out there, audio to text is an imperative day-to-day organizational and operational function that helps keep businesses, researchers, and other industry professionals moving.

Audio to Text Services: The Perks

Switching over from hand-transcribing and typing out every audio or video file’s contents to taking advantage of an audio to text service comes with a range of benefits:

  • Quick text versions of your important recordings, without the typing.
  • Less busy work and more room for creative, problem-solving efforts.
  • Specialized solutions for every field of work, research and study.
  • Human transcribers with industry-specific experience.
  • Less computer time and far less risk of injury.
  • Completely accurate recall of information.

Overall, you’ll spend less time, energy, mental space and even money in the long-run, while getting more accurate, quickly delivered audio to text transcripts to your inbox.

Service Over Software

Speech recognition software and technologies alone have been making the headlines – after all, machine learning and voice technology are more advanced than ever before. As much as these technologies have evolved, though, they still require a human touch to ensure the highest accuracy.

Our audio to text process uses a hybrid approach that assures faster turnaround time and higher accuracy using a combination of speech technology and expert transcriptionists.

How to Make Transcripts Edit-Friendly

Once you submit your audio for transcription and have received your final audio to text files, you might be wondering how to make the transcripts as clean and easy-to-edit as possible. They naturally come with some timestamping grids, and, in the case of NVivo transcripts, added columns for analysis.

Have no fear! We make it easy to make things nice and clean, so you can edit, share and distribute as needed.

1. Remove timestamps and speaker IDs.

Place your cursor above the first timestamp until it becomes a black arrow. Then, click once to highlight the entire timestamp column. Select to Delete.

2. Remove the Excel grid from your transcript.

Select the rows or table you want to convert to text. Under Table Tools, on the  Layout tab, click Convert to Text.

The Convert to Text option is highlighted on the Table Tools Layout tab.

In the Convert to Text box, click the separator character you want to use in place of the column boundaries. Rows will be separated by paragraph marks. Click OK.

3. Remove text or paragraph breaks from the transcript.

If you highlight a page of your transcript, you will notice horizontal white lines throughout the highlighted text. These are the breaks of individual cells.

  • If the text you want to remove fills the entire cell, highlight the text, right-click on it, select “Delete Cells” from the pop-up menu, then select “Shift Cells Up” from the sub-menu and click OK.
  • If the text that you want to remove does not fill an entire cell, you can delete the text as you normally would in Word.
  • Removing a paragraph break will likely involve combining 2 cells. Highlight the text below the break, and paste it above the break. This will leave you with an empty cell. From there, you only need to do delete the empty cell. Do this by highlighting the empty cell, right-clicking on it, selecting “Delete Cells” from the pop-up menu, then selecting “Shift Cells Up” from the sub-menu and clicking OK.

4. Removing the TranscribeMe Logo

Double click the logo to enable editing in the header of your document, select the logo, and click the Delete key.


Ready to get started with your own audio to text project? Get a free quote right here.