Harness your voice using Transcribe in Word

A new enhancement in Microsoft Office 365’s Word for the webTranscribe in Word. It leverages the Azure Cognitive Services AI platform.

transcribe-voice

Transcribe converts speech (recorded directly in Word or from an uploaded audio file) to a text transcript with each speaker individually separated.

We can record our conversations directly in Word for the web and it transcribes them automatically with each speaker identified separately. Transcript will appear alongside the Word document, along with the recording.

For now, English (EN-US) is the only language supported for transcribe audio

Once the recording is finished, we can:

  • easily follow the flow of the transcript
  • revisit parts of the recording by playing back the time-stamped audio
  • edit the transcript for any corrections or if we see something amiss
  • save the full transcript as a Word document

How to use it?

Transcribe in Word is already available in Word for the web for all Microsoft 365 subscribers. Usage wise, it is completely unlimited to record and transcribe within Word for the Web. 

There is a five hour limit per month for uploaded recordings and each uploaded recording is limited to 200mb.

transcribe-word
Credit: Microsoft

Real life applications …

It has multiple values in different aspects of usage:

  • would be much easier to concentrate in meetings & discussions if doing multitask affects (taking notes during discussion)
  • provide important quotes with others in quick time
  • summarize the meeting based on key topics identified
    • Minutes of meetings
    • Key notes
  • opens up potential for NLP world (AI) in future
    • access patterns particular speakers on how they speak, use specific words, provide feedback
    • access questions and their response, act specifically
    • improve auto corrections

Wrap Up

Seems like a nice move by Microsoft, to cover more than one aspect where it can help. Worth a feature to try out and see how it works and helps.

Reference: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/08/25/microsoft-365-transcription-voice-commands-word/


Keep exploring!

Samples GitHub profile Readme