Voice search is becoming increasingly popular among smartphone users, so it is a logical move to introduce voice control functionality in as many software solutions as possible.
This time it was the turn of Microsoft, which announced great news to its users. Namely, Microsoft has enabled audio transcription of content into text within the Microsoft Word tool – which will certainly provide some users with easier and simpler creation of new content.
In professional newsrooms, voice-to-text software is nothing new and we can say that we had to wait quite a long time for Microsoft to implement this function in the Word application. Maybe something like that wouldn’t have happened so soon if the big Microsoft Word competitor, Google Docs, hadn’t had such an option for a long time. Within the Google Docs tool, it is possible to dictate text, which the software then automatically converts into written text – thus further shortening the time to create new content. Of course, the computer-written text is not perfect and has flaws – and it works best in English (which is also the most popular).
Microsoft Word now gets this super audio transcription feature, making the Microsoft 365 tool even better for all creatives. The focus of this new tool is currently in the English-speaking world, but it is to be expected that it will soon approach the quality in other world languages. As for the conversion itself, it is possible to upload an audio file to Word up to 200MB in size which is then automatically converted to text or there is another option: dictating the text that the computer automatically converts into the written record.
The audio transcription option is currently only available through the Word for Web application, but will likely appear within the full Microsoft 365 package soon. Of course, Microsoft still has many tasks ahead of it in order to iron out this system and achieve its full purpose. Certainly, the positive in this whole story for the entire market is – that now Google will probably be even more dedicated to improving this service.
