Microsoft’s Transcribe in Word feature is going to make life easier for students, reporters

Microsoft is adding an audio transcription feature on Word which will be appearing from now. Transcribe in Word will appear in the online version of Word for Microsoft 365 subscribers and this will provide users an easy hack to automatically transcribe audio.

Microsoft is supporting existing audio files and the availability to record conversations directly on Word for the web and then automatically transcribe them.

For a transcribed conversation, Microsoft’s AI will separate each speaker and break the conversation down into sections that can be easily played back, edited and inserted into the Word document.

This transcribe feature also supports audio or video that you might have captured elsewhere and there is support for up to 200MB of MP3, WAV, M4A, or MP4 files. Processing time for these files will vary if you are uploading separate files but it is much faster if you are recording on Word itself.

This feature works by capturing any audio from your PC so you can use it to transcribe meetings, calls and even YouTube videos. Word can capture audio from your laptop/PC’s microphone as well.

Microsoft is essentially targeting journalists to transcribe interviews, students to record lectures and anyone else who needs to transcribe meetings and calls.

For now, Transcribe is launching initially on Word for web, but this feature is going to be brought in on Word for iOS and Android later this year. And English is the only language that is supported and it should expand to other languages soon.

Microsoft has limited transcription to Microsoft 365 subscribers, however, this is also limited to five-hours monthly for uploaded audio and there is no option to extend this transcription time for now. For audio recorded on Word directly, there are no transcription limits.

For uploaded audio, this works out to only 300 mins a month. Competitors like Otter.ai offers 600 mins monthly free of charge.