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How to Transcribe Audio and Video to Text in 2 Minutes (2022 Guide)

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Conducting dozens of interviews and focus groups is a cumbersome process. Worse yet, you have to convert hours of recordings into text, format the thick pages of transcripts for readability, go through all of them to identify patterns and trends, and report your work to upper management. 

The entire process can take up to 2 months with significant labor costs involved during that period. 

Instead, you could use an automated transcription software like Speak to reduce your workload by up to 40%. 

Learn how to transcribe a YouTube video instantly and easily with Speak's intuitive transcription and natural language processing software. Join 7,000+ users finding radical efficiencies with their audio, video and text data to drive value. 

How to transcribe audio to text

You have three options when transcribing audio to text: 

  1. Upload your audio file or URL to Speak and take advantage of automatic transcription (almost instant with up to 95% accuracy)
  2. Order professional transcription through Speak and have someone do it for you (2-3 days with up to 99% accuracy)
  3. Build your own audio to text tool(most time-consuming)
 

Here’s a step-by-step guide for the each option.

How to transcribe audio to text automatically

Step 1: Sign up for an account at Speak

If you’re a new user, select “Start your trial” and sign up for an account to begin your 7-day trial, with no credit card required.

Start your trial

Step 2: Upload your file

In Speak’s dashboard, select “New Upload”.

You can upload any audio recording with the following formats: mp3, wav, ogg, web, m4p, m4a. 

Before proceeding, you can retitle the file, add a description, or delete any accidental uploads.

Once you’re satisfied, select “Confirm & Pay”. You can only upload up to 30 minutes during your trial, after which time you'll need to sign up for a plan to continue using Speak. 

If you want to build a personalized plan, you can get up to 40% off by telling us what you need. 

Speak will immediately transcribe all the recordings simultaneously. Smaller files will take a shorter time, so you can use those first while waiting for Speak to transcribe the larger files.

And that’s it! 

Speak’s automated transcribing tool is one of the fastest, most affordable in the market right now. We allow you to upload up to 30 minutes for free and give you NLP analysis of your language data as well. 

To learn more about how Speak fares against other transcription services, check out our comparison table for Speak Ai alternatives for more information about each tools’ pricing, text analysis availability, and more.

If you need professional transcription of audio to text

Step 1: Sign up for Speak

You’ll need to be signed up for Speak, which you can do so by starting your 7-day trial with no credit card required. 

Start your trial

Step 2: Upload your recording

Log in to your Speak account and select “New Upload” in the dashboard. Once you’ve uploaded the files to be transcribed, select “Confirm & Pay”

Step 3: Select the human transcription option

At the payment stage, select the human transcription option and you’ll receive your transcripts in as early as 24 hours (time varies according to the size of the job).

How to transcribe video to text

Step 1: Sign up for an account at Speak

If you’re a new user, select “Start your trial” and sign up for an account to begin your 7-day trial, with no credit card required.

Start your trial

Step 2: Upload your file

In Speak’s dashboard, select “New Upload”.

You can either upload the file from your device or paste the YouTube URL. The supported file formats are as follows: mp4, wmv, avi, m4v, mov, flv.

Once you’re satisfied, select “Confirm & Pay”. You can only upload up to 30 minutes during your trial, after which time you'll need to sign up for a plan to continue using Speak. 

Don't forget that If you want to build a personalized plan, you can get up to 40% off by telling us what you need. 

Step 3: Edit and share your files

Speak will immediately transcribe all the recordings simultaneously. Smaller files will take a shorter time, so you can use those first while waiting for Speak to transcribe the larger files.

Once they’re done, you can look through your transcripts and manually edit any errors before exporting the media player. 

Transcribe audio or video to text with Speak Ai’s API

Speak Ai’s API can currently transcribe 2 languages to text: English (United States) and French. 

Here’s how to transcribe audio or video to text with our API:

Step 1: Sign up for a Speak Ai account

Get started with our 7-day trial that does not require a credit card. 

Start your trial

Step 2: Obtain your API key

All paid users can access their API keys through the Developers page, which is at the bottom of the sidebar. You can also access our Speak Ai API documentation page for more information.

What can you do with the transcripts?

Once the transcripts are ready, our comprehensive dashboard allows you to identify insights, search for key moments, do manual editing, conduct sentiment analysis, export to various file types, and share it.

Insights

Speak automatically identifies and categorizes keywords in your transcript. Our natural language processing (NLP) and named entity recognition (NER) technology segments these terms into 18 categories, among which are:

  • Keywords (repeating terms in the transcript)
  • Brand
  • Product
  • Location
  • Date
  • Language
  • Law (named documents mentioned in the laws)
  • Money (monetary values with units)

 

If our default categories aren’t what you’re looking for, you can add custom categories that better suit your needs.

Search for key moments and edit

You can search for specific terms in the transcript via the search bar or in the transcript editor. Our automated transcription produces 80%+ accurate transcripts. You can either manually edit them or engage our professional transcribers for 99%+ accurate transcripts.

Sentiment and text analysis

Our dashboard comes complete with text and sentiment analysis functions to quickly extract patterns and trends across all your files

Export your transcript in multiple formats

After analyzing and editing the text transcripts, you can export them in various formats including TXT, PDF, DOCX, SRT, and more. 

You can even secure the media player with a password to protect sensitive information within the transcripts. If it’s for personal use, you can simply choose the publicly accessible option which allows anyone with the link to open. 

Other options you can choose before exporting the media player include:

  • SEO-optimization
  • CTA buttons to jump onto your website from the player
  • Downloadable data-visualization of insights
  • Logo and background image

More audio transcription guides

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I had 10 one-hour interviews that I needed to transcribe and analyze. Speak helped with that process immensely. Wishing you all the luck. I seriously think you have a winning product here.
Karen Shulman Dupuis
Coach at Centre for Social Innovation
As a person who spends hours per day brainstorming out loud I never had the ability to make sense of all of my thoughts. Speak Ai had the ability to synthesize hours of audio into useful insights.
Justin Finkelstein
Citi Technology Innovation Center, Founding Member
“This is super cool. I can definitely see the value in what you have built. We look forward to continuing to work with you and accessing this powerful technology.”

Ashley Conyngham
Director, Marketing & Communications, LEDC
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