Audio to text for Word and Google Docs

The route into Word

1. Upload the recording above and wait for the transcript.
2. Correct it in the editor while the audio plays.
3. Copy the text with the Copy button, or download it as a text file.
4. In Word, paste into a new document, or use File, then Open, and choose the .txt file. Then Save As a .docx.
5. Add your headings, fonts and speaker names in Word.

The route into Google Docs

Paste the copied text into a new Google Doc. Or upload the downloaded .txt file to Google Drive and open it with Google Docs, which makes a Doc from it. Google Docs also has voice typing for live dictation, which is a different job from transcribing a file you already have.

Which export to start from

• ·Plain text is the cleanest start for a document.
• ·Text with timestamps if you want to keep the times beside each line.
• ·Markdown if the document tool you use reads it, or you want headings kept.
• ·SRT and VTT are subtitle files, for video, not for a Word document.

What you will do by hand

A transcript arrives as one line per segment, so a pasted transcript is a column of short lines. Join them into paragraphs and add paragraph breaks where the topic changes. Speaker names come from the labels you add in the editor (up to eight with a free account). Tables, headers and page numbers are Word's job, not the transcript's.

If you pay for Microsoft 365

Word has its own Transcribe feature for Microsoft 365 users that puts the transcript straight into a document. We compared it with this site on a dated page: Word Transcribe alternative. The difference that matters most is the subscription and the subtitle files.

Size and length

Without an account one file can be up to 15 minutes and 25 MB. A free account lifts those per-file limits and keeps your transcripts in a library, so for a longer recording create one instead of cutting the file up.