(Originally published on January 31, 2023 by Abhinav Santoshi)
Hi, Microsoft 365 Insiders! My name is Abhinav Santoshi and I’m a Product Manager on the Office Voice team. I’m excited to share with you the availability of the Transcribe feature you love in Word for Windows.
Tired of manually transcribing audio recordings from meetings, interviews, and lectures? Look no further! The highly anticipated Transcribe feature is now available in Word for Windows. It allows you to convert speech to a text transcript, with each speaker individually separated.
Imagine being able to focus on delivering a speech, conducting an interview, recording a lecture, taking class notes, or attending a presentation, all while knowing you can listen back and read the transcript afterwards. The Transcribe feature also allows you to play back timestamped audio and edit the transcript to make corrections. Plus, you can save the full transcript as a Word document or insert snippets of it into existing documents.
You can transcribe speech in two ways:
You can record directly in Word while taking notes, and then transcribe the recording. Word transcribes in the background as you record. You’ll see the transcript after you click the Save and transcribe now button.
NOTE: The OneDrive account where your audio is being uploaded will be shown in transcription pane. Currently you can only create one new transcription per page.
You can upload a pre-recorded audio file to transcribe the recording. This is useful when you want to refer to a past lecture or training session and be able to listen to the content again.
NOTE: Transcribe currently supports the .wav, .mp4, .m4a, and .mp3 formats.
Pause the recording by selecting the Pause (Active Mic) button.
Resume recording by selecting the Record (Inactive Mic) button.
Notice that the relevant transcript section is highlighted as the audio plays. You can also easily jump to a specific moment in your recording by clicking the timestamp to recall more context.
NOTE: You can edit the speaker label and change all occurrences of it to something else.
From the Transcribe pane, you can add the entire transcript, or specific sections of it, to your Word document.
This feature does not store your content or audio data. Microsoft only uses your content to provide you with audio results. For more information about experiences that analyze your content, see Connected Experiences in Office.
Please visit the language availability section of Transcribe your recordings in Word for Microsoft 365 on the Microsoft support website.
This feature is rolling out to Beta Channel users running Version 2302 (Build 16107.20000) or later.
Features are released over some time to ensure things are working smoothly. We highlight features that you may not have because they are slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Sometimes we remove elements to further improve them based on your feedback. Though this is rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product, even if you, as an Insider, have had the opportunity to try it.
We want to hear from you! Please share your feedback about the Transcribe experience with us right from Word by tapping the File > Send Feedback button in the app window.
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