Transcribing Audio To Text

Dictanote is a note-taking app with built-in speech recognition capabilities. You can manually dictate text to transcribe it. However, this can be quite laborious.

One of the most requested features in Dictanote is to transcribe audio from a file via Dictanote. This involves playing the audio and routing the audio internally to the microphone, so that Dictanote gets it. In a previous blog post, I presented a way to do it on Mac.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to do it in Windows (this method works on Mac too):

Step 1: Download VB Cable Driver from https://www.vb-audio.com/Cable/index.htm#DownloadCable

After you install the driver, it will add two virtual devices. A virtual audio input device and a virtual audio output device.

Step 2: Go to Audio Settings and change input and output to the virtual devices

This wires the system such that any audio output is routed to system back as audio input.

Step 3: Play the audio file you want to transcribe on any media player

At the same time, open Dictanote in Chrome and start dictation:

The transcribed text will appear in Dictanote as the audio file plays.

Try it now at https://dictanote.co

Note that this method works on Mac OS too. You might also want to checkout https://dictanote.co/transcribe/ — an automatic speech to text service to convert audio files to text. The key difference between manual transcription and Dictanote Transcribe is that;

1. It uses larger and more-accurate speech to text models
2. Dictanote Transcribe does automatic punctuation
3. It is faster: you can process hours of audio files within minutes