If you have recorded some important lectures or speeches and want to convert it into text (transcription), you can either go the manual route of listening to the speech and typing the text or you can make use of the recent developments in the artificial intelligence (AI). For the latter, we need a special tool that can run your audio file and create an accurate transcript of the audio file.
Vovsoft Speech to Text Converter is such an AI powered software that can take your audio files, run them through AI servers and produce very accurate transcripts. However before you can use this software, you have to create an IBM Cloud user account, start the Speech to Text service, and use the API key from Speech to Text service from your IBM Cloud account. This is needed for IBM AI services. You can save time by visiting https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/speech-to-text after creating your IBM Cloud account.
You have to copy two things from IBM Speech-to-Text service – API key and the URL into the Vovsoft Speech to Text Converter settings. Once this step is done, you can go ahead and load an audio file for transcription. You can also record your voice by clicking on the microphone icon in the toolbar. When recording, make sure there is no background noise and microphone is close to you. After loading the audio file, we can click on the Convert button in the toolbar.
It takes a few seconds before showing the converted text in the window. You can then save it as a TXT file on your computer. If it hangs up or takes too much time, then perhaps your IBM service API Key or URL are wrong. It uses a language profile for conversion, and if you are not getting good speech-to-text conversion then perhaps switching to a different profile can give you better results.
Speech to Text Converter is not free but we can use it in the trial mode by dismissing a nag window every time we launch it. It uses AI services provided by IBM Cloud which makes it both fast and accurate.
You can download Vovsoft Speech to Text Converter from https://vovsoft.com/software/speech-to-text-converter/.