How to automatically turn audio into text for free (and how to turn video recordings into text, too!)

Hello everybody, welcome to blogbuzzs. In my channel, I teach you different ways to make money online, and some of those ways are transcribing audio to text and getting paid to do it. If you haven’t already subscribed to my channel, do that. So today, I want to walk you through this software. And it’s free, up to 600 minutes per month: otter.ai. And this is software or a website where you can upload an audio file. It will transcribe it for you with pretty close to perfect punctuation and spelling and allow you to edit that File easily so that you can then use that transcription file and Submit it or upload it or copy and paste it to one of your job platforms.

Now I will note that some different platforms do not allow you to do this, like QA world. But other ones don’t care if you do it. And this is also a great tool if you are taking a transcription test and they send you, or they have you download an audio file that you later need to transcribe. This is an easier way for you to transcribe the File without having to type the entire File out yourself. And you have to make some edits. There are a lot of uses for this software. So let me walk you through how to create an account and do this. So first, you’re going to go to otter.ai. 

Then you’re going to Click on Sign Up free, and you can choose to sign up with Apple, your Google account, and Microsoft. I just put in my first, and last name and email, put in a password, and then click on create account. You can choose to sync your calendar and contacts. I didn’t want to do that. So I just clicked go to the app. Okay, make sure to confirm your email. And once you do that, you can go back to otter.ai. You click that you confirmed. Okay, now you’re on the home website, and it might be a little confusing what to do at first, but all you have to do is click on my conversations. And once you do that, you can click on Import audio/video. Now what you have to do is click on Browse files. And so, if you have the File that you want to transcribe located on your computer, go and find it. 

If you don’t have the File on your computer, there are many different ways you can right-click Save As and save an audio file to your computer. Again, it just depends on the website that you’re using. So for this example, I’ve decided to take my File from one of my videos on my English teaching website. And I’ve uploaded it, clicked open, and now you can see that the File will start to upload. It will track your progress. Okay, and once it’s completely uploaded, click on done. 

Okay, now you might need to wait up to… it could be up to five minutes, depending on the length of your File, while it processes the File and transcribes it for you. Okay, now you can see that this has finished processing. And if we scroll down, you can see that it has transcribed the entire audio File for me. And it’s done a pretty good job of, you know, putting in correct punctuation and everything. So what we can do is we can press the play button to preview this.

And it’s cool because it will play the audio File for you. And it will highlight the words so you can see if it matches up. And if not, you can correct the word so let’s press play to preview this. Hello everyone, and welcome to Sparkle English. Today’s mini-lesson is on the difference between effect and effect. It is very common in the English language. Okay, we’ll press The pause button again to stop it. Now, if you want to edit this, we go up here and click edit if there are any mistakes. Okay, so for this one, I’m going to edit this because this is the title. 

Now this one’s an interesting one because there will be a few mistakes. After all, this is for my youtube channel on teaching English. So I wanted to say this is affected with an A, and this is with an E. Okay, for example, they put right R-I-G-H-T, which should be written. So what you do is edit it like you would any text editor. So for some reason, this is not adding in all the different capitals, but we can go through it and edit it accordingly. Okay, great. 

So I’ve just finished editing this entire Clip here. So it’s saving automatically, as you can see. One neat thing is down here: you can change the speed as well. So let’s say you’re listening to someone, not exactly sure what they’re saying, and trying to transcribe this audio File. You can put the speed down to 0.5 or speed it up even if you want. And then press play again. The comments section of this video. I hope… They also have an option that you can click on your speaker ID. 

So let’s say I want to make it my name for both of these. I can do that. Now imagine that these were two different speakers. I could click here and add in whatever label I wanted. So let’s say I’m going to make this speaker two and click tag. And Then let’s say I’ll make this one speaker one. Just depends on what your purpose is for using this software, but for example, let’s say this was speaker one, and this was speaker two. And you can click like this if you want to break up the paragraphs. And if you want to change the speaker, you can click on it again and select a different speaker. 

Now for this, it’s one speaker, it’s just me and the entire clip, but this is how you would do it if you were changing between different speakers. Of course, this is with otter.ai, so this formatting might not be what you want. So now I want to teach you what to do when you want to export this, whether you’re going to copy and paste this into a transcription website to Submit your File, or maybe you’re doing a test or something. You have to email them a file, for example, with a way with words or a transcription hub. I’m going to click on Done. And now we’ll click on this little three-dot icon, and we’re going to click on Export text.

Okay, so you have different options here. You can change the export format: clipboard or text. Now they have docx, PDF, and SRT. All of these are premium files. So you’re just going to use a clipboard or text. Let’s stick with the text. And you can choose to export like this. Speaker one, and then we’ve got speaker two. You can toggle on and off to include the speaker names and timestamps or merge the same speaker segments. So if I Kept the speaker names as before, you’d see I’d have Speaker one, Speaker one, Speaker one, Speaker one, Speaker two. 

Now I’m just going to take everything off because I don’t want it to have any formatting. I’d rather put in the speakers later on. So as you can see, if we scroll down here, this is just a raw copy of the entire File, edited and transcribed, and later on, I can put in the speaker IDs depending on what I want. Now note that it says transcribed by otter.ai at the very bottom, so make sure you erase this. Now what I’m going to do is click Continue. You can also choose Export as a monologue, which merges the entire File with all the paragraphs together so you can separate them later. 

I’m Going to take that off. I’m just going to. I want it like this. Okay, so I’m going to click Continue. And now it’s saved as a .txt file. So you can go ahead and open it with a notepad. Or maybe if you have notepad++, I’ll open it with notepad. You can see it; I have the entire File transcribed. So I’m going to go ahead and erase that last part. And now, depending on what you want to do, you can go edit, select all, then edit, copy, or press Ctrl C on your keyboard, and then you can go ahead and paste it wherever you want to paste it. 

Maybe you want to paste it into one of your transcription job platforms, or if you’re doing a test, a transcription test for, like I said before, way with words or Transcription hub or something like that. And you need to paste this into a Microsoft document, and you can do that too. So overall, I think this is an awesome tool, otter.ai. I’m happy one of my subscribers told me about it, and it’s cool. It’s a great way for you to transcribe an audio file you have and see all the punctuation. And it does most of the work for you. 

You need to read it through and make small corrections, maybe change some capital letters and some small English errors, but then you have a nice transcript you can use and submit to your job platforms. Again, some different jobs. websites do not allow you to do this. So that is up to you what you decide and Which platforms you’re working with. But if you can do this, it is highly recommended because it will save you a lot of time having to type out every single word yourself. So thank you very much for watching this tutorial. I hope you found it useful, and subscribe to the blog for more tips and tricks on transcribing and making money online. Thanks for reading.