What I recommend for transcribing content

Adam Rothstein
3 min readDec 4, 2021

--

Descript logo

Transcribing has always been a part of meetings and anything else that requires a voice. Back in the past, you had to write down the information, whether that was with a pen and paper, by typewriter, or by a computer. Today, we have transcription software to alleviate this problem.

There are many programs on websites that deal with this. https://www.textfromtospeech.com/en/voice-to-text/ is one of the most popular websites for this. From there, you can pay about $9 per year of transcription. This may be alright if you’re only going to do this with a simple voice recorder. What I recommend for transcribing is either Descript or Adobe Premiere Pro.

Adobe premiere pro now has a new feature that allows you to transcribe your audio and video clips to transcribe the audio from it. Open up Adobe Audition along with Adobe Premiere Pro 2022. From there, you should see an option in the top left screen where the video is usually played. You will also find an option to transcribe it or a close captioning option. Click on that.

Closed captioning edit in Adobe Premiere Pro 2022

Then after that is complete, you will need to go back and fix any errors. This may seem frustrating at first. But it’s worth it because it provides more ways to get your message out there.

Descript is a video editing, audio editing, and transcription software. This software is easy for anyone to pick up and use. This is probably the best software I’ve ever used for almost anything dealing with audio.

That’s saying a lot, coming from me. You can go to descript.com, sign up, get a free trial and get three hours of transcription time.

Once you’ve signed up and installed it on your computer, you can start transcribing video and audio clips. The transcription is usually done within a few minutes. After that, you can remove all the uhs and the ahs out of it. Your audio clip for 12 bucks a month. This software is worth the deal. There are many other transcription software programs.

I recommend both Adobe premiere pro 2022 and Descript because of their simplicity. Transcribing audio and video is only going to get more popular as time goes on. People will want to write articles. In addition to making video and audio clips.

Now imagine writing a book, you have all the ideas down, but you can’t exactly put them into words. When you do get that big idea, have an audio recorder on standby. Then start talking, and get all your ideas down. Then after you’re done, convert them to an MP3 file. Put them into Descript. You will need to go back and re-edit some words along with removing the uhs and the ahs, but it will reduce time writing your book or writing up anything that you produced from an audio clip or a video clip.

--

--

Adam Rothstein

Sports and tech writer. Lover of American sports stadiums.