Posts on transcription
How to facilitate transcription of recorded voice
What to do when the AI facilitated transcription stops working
How to automatically transcribe longer sections of audio
How to automatically generate text from a voice recording
This is how to do it on a Mac (but the process is essentially the same on a pc). You will need to download Audacity and Soundflower both are free programs and available for both mac ios and windows.
Please note that no links are added but only the adresses as text*. You can cut and paste the link adress into any browser you are using.
1) Install programs
- Audacity can be found at audacityteam.org/download/
- Soundflower can be found at soundflower.en.softonic.com/mac. (If you run into problems with the installation you can read more at techwiser.com/record-internal-audio-on-mac/)
- If you have persistent problems installing soundflower there is a program called the unarchiver (theunarchiver.com) that did the trick for me. I unpacked the soundflower installation pack first and then went back and followed the installation procedure outlined in thetechwiser.com/record-internal-audio-on-mac/
2) If necessary reformat** the sound file to mp3
3) Change settings for dictation so that output and input for sound is soundflower 2ch
4) Transcribe
- Open mp3 file in audacity
- Open notepad (notes worked better than pages for some reason)
- Play sound from audacity and start dictation with double clicking fn
The dictation seems to be able to cope with about 40 seconds of voice before it gets lost so I had to keep restarting every 30 seconds keeping track of where I was in Audacity. I also slowed down the speed to about 90% which seemed to make the dictation work better (but I did no comprehensive trial here).
This solution allows me to work offline keeping the integrity of my data and participants intact. I don’t have consent for any third party tools such as google or other online solutions.
*No active links are included in this blog post. Please refer to the EU 2001 Information Society Directive, and 2019 Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market.
**One way to reformat (convert) a sound file to mp3 is by using vlc player. This ensures that you are working offline maintaining data integrity.
- Open the file in vlc on a pc
- Install vlc if necessary. Vlc player can be found at videolan.org/vlc/
- Open stream/convert
- Save as mp3 but ALSO manually rename the file as mp3 (edit the file extension)
What do you do when the dictation function just will not cooperate?
I thought I had it all sorted for using the dictation tools to facilitate transcription, as I have been working with this for a while now without any problems. This morning I set up a new file, pressed all the right buttons, and nothing happened. As you can imagine this was not a good moment. I took some time for me to sort out but now it is all working again.
Why did it happen and what did I do to fix it?
I have been transcribing speech in different languages. One change did not cause any problems but changing multiple times between languages apparently made the AI get lost, or confused, and go on strike.
To fix it, I had to turn off the dictation and restart the the computer with the dictation function turned off. That was the key thing.
In this case I was using a Mac but my guess is that this is just as likely to happen using a windows computer (PC). The method to sort it out should then be transferrable.
To fix the problem
- Turn off the dictation
- Close all running programs
- Restart computer
- After restart turn off any programs that uses audio (such as Spotify, iTunes, ManyCam etc.)
- Turn on dictation and check that It is set to the language you want
- Check that all output channels are set for transcription. For instructions on how to do this please see How to facilitate transcription of recorded voice
multimodal study 