Speech recognition (dictation) from audio file

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I’ve never used speech recognition in Word 2007, haven’t even installed it. Before I start the process, I’d like to know whether it will do what I have in mind. I have some spoken word files, lectures and such, in mp3 format. I’d like to use Word’s speech recognition feature to turn the audio files into print documents, that is, play an audio file and have Word turn it all into a document. Is that possible? I can probably figure out how to set it up once I know that it’s even possible.

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Hi DavidToronto,

Your question caught my eye because my husband experimented with speech recognition from recorded interviews. You can’t do it directly into Word because Windows speech recognition, which Word uses, doesn’t support it. But there are other programs which do. Recent versions of Dragon Dictate, for example, have an mp3-to-text transcription feature. HERE is a link to someone asking your same question and the answer.

Regarding my husband’s experience, it didn’t work well because the recordings were not so hot. Speech recognition still requires clarity to work in a meaningful way. Unless the microphone was very good and close to the lecturer, you will probably spend more time fixing typos than it would take you to transcribe it the old-fashioned way — which is what my husband had to do.

Best, Kim

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Actually if you read the other reply in Kim’s link you’ll see that it is possible with WSR as well if you buy the WSR toolkit that I think costs around 20 dollars. The problem is that speech recognition is not really able to do what you want because each user needs to create a profile that is trained and helps the programme to learn what you’re saying, for this reason you can’t just use any old voice and expect it to work with your profile. There are a few workarounds (such as listening to the tape and dictating it yourself using SR) but they obviously lengthen the process. There are several good SR sites with forums, you could start off here:

http://www.speechcomputing.com

Besides searching the archives you can ask questions on a wide range of SR topics and be sure to find plenty of very knowledgeable people.

Graham

PS
I see you don’t specify whether it is material that you yourself have dictated, if so you may have more luck although it will really depend on the quality of the recording (background noise, etc.)

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Dear David, You can automatically transcribe majority of your audio files with the help of VoxcribeCC.
Try it, you won’t regret.
serkank

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You say you’d like to play an Audio file and have it transcribe…is this a plain audio file or some dictation?
Any transcription programs I’ve seen require that you say “period”, “new paragraph”, etc. A regular audio file would come out as one long sentence that would need manual parsing.

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