Transcribing an audio file in Word for the web

Have you ever interviewed someone, saved the audio file to your computer, and then had to start the laborious task of transcribing it? By using Word for the web, you can upload that audio file and Word will transcribe it for you! Sounds like a great way to get the majority of your transcription work done automatically. Here’s how it works…

I used a 3rd party tool to record the following paragraph in an MP4 format:

Now using Word for the web, I went to Home > Dictate > Transcribe:

In the Transcribe panel, I selected Upload Audio. You can see I have 300 minutes per month:

Here’s the file I have stored on my computer:

Once I uploaded the file and started the transcription, I saw the following panel to tell me how the transcription was going:

Once finished, I saw the transcribed results on the right side of the screen, along with time stamps and which speaker was talking. When I was ready to put the text into the document, I clicked on Add to document:

I had four options on what to pull into the document, and in this case I just wanted the text:

And there I have it… a transcript of the recording, and it was accurate!

I could have selected the option to start recording from within Word for the web, and it would have allowed me to do the same time of transcription without the need for an additional piece of software for recording:

I did find that with recording directly in Word, I had a couple more errors, and everything ended up in a single long paragraph:

Here’s the resulting document:

It you need more than 300 minutes, it appears that Microsoft will allow unlimited minutes if your admin requests that from Microsoft. The unlimited minutes is a preview option, and it may go back to 300 minutes in the future.

For more information, check out Microsoft 365 saves you time and effort with transcription and voice commands in Word.