Speech to text software (audio transcribing) for mac

macos mac audio speech-to-text transcription

7,749

Solution 1

Tough domain. There's no open source projects, that I'm aware of. Speech to text is probably best classified as a open research problem still. If you're prepared to punt $200, there's MacSpeech Dictate. But I'd be wary of claims of 90% accuracy.

Worth noting the case of SpinVox, a company that claimed to translate Voice Mail into text messages automatically, but had to use call centres full of workers in South Africa and the Philippines to do so accurately.

Solution 2

Found VoiceBase to be the best free transcribing tool and it is online so you don't need to install any software and works everywhere. I use to record voice memos in my iPhone and send them there.

Files of around 5MB/7 minutes (500-600 words) take 5-10 minutes to get transcribed (they send you an email when finished). It is sometimes inaccurate (ie. transcribes bias instead of buyers) and doesn't do any punctuation but I'd say 80-90% of the transcription is correct. It definitely saves a lot of time and keystrokes.

Solution 3

One thing you could try (although not on a daily basis) is uploading the audio as a video to Youtube, then asking YouTube to transcribe the video, giving you English captions...can take up to 24 hours for YouTube to do this, however...The caption file is even downloadable and you can edit them yourself, so you could copy and paste the text to wherever you wanted...

7,749

GiH

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

GiH almost 2 years

What is the best speech to text software for mac? I have an hours worth of audio that I need to transcribe, and I'd really like to not have to do it manually :-).

I prefer free options and I like open source so if there is a project I'd like to know. All answers are welcome though.
GiH over 14 years

I tried out Macspeech Dictate, didn't like it and its expensive on top of that... Honestly, I can't believe its 2009 and there is no solution for this yet.
UNK over 14 years

It's complex as hell stuff. Just think about how bad Text to Speech is, and computers were BUILT to deal with text! (Well, numbers, but text is numbers anyway when you get down to it)
GiH over 14 years

I haven't been able to find anything, I think Macspeech dictate is the only option...
Georg Schölly about 14 years

Speech-to-text works usually only well when there's no background noise and the voice is very clear. That's often not the case if the audio wasn't especially recorded for that purpose.
HikeMike about 12 years

Are you affiliated with Voicebase?
Xavi Esteve about 12 years

lol, not at all. does it sound like spam? I'd been trying several free text to voice and found this one to be the best and since it was free I thought people would benefit from adding it here
slhck about 12 years

Well, it's just that we get a ton of spam, so excuse us. Just being a bit cautious these days, that's all!
OverToasty over 10 years

FWIW - I bought MacSpeech Dictate a month ago - oh boy ... they haven't bothered to update it for two OSX releases, it crashed in the middle of training, and the accuracy was really bad, while the audio recordings used as source material where very good ... if it was $29, I'd say, sure, but at ~5x that price, it looks like Nuance bought out MacSpeech just to shut it down, if that's the case, they succeeded: I got my money back.