How To Transcribe Audio On a Mac

Hi, this is Gay with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can create a text transcription of an audio file on your Mac using no additional software. 

If you've got an audio file with spoken text in it you can use macOS Sequoia to transcribe that into text. Now this is different than dictation. Dictation is using one of two methods on your Mac to speak into the microphone and then have that output as text, live as you speak. Transcription is when you take an already recorded audio file and then convert that to text. Now this works in macOS Sequoia and later and your language needs to be set to English for one of these countries. 

To do this we're going to use the Voice Memos app. So I'm going to launch that. Now the primary use for Voice Memos is to record yourself and then have that recording saved as a voice memo. You can do this on your iPhone, your iPad, or your Mac and they are all synced through iCloud. So you can record, say, on your iPhone and then later checkout the Voice Memo you made on your Mac. But when you record you also now get a transcript of it. So I'll record a sample here. (This is a test). Now you get your recording here. You can resume or replace a section. Do all sorts of different things that has to do with recording voice memos. You click Done here and you can see all of your recordings here on the left. In addition with recordings selected like this one you can click here. Instead of seeing the wave form here you see a transcript. So you see it like this.

Now this is great for recording voice memos and then later not having to listen to them but instead be able to go back and just read them. But in addition to recording your voice and then getting it transcribed you can also import an audio file. I've got some audio files here on the right. They are in a variety of different formats. Now if you try to drag a wave file into Voice Memos it won't import. Same thing with a MP3 file. It seems like importing doesn't work. But actually a M4A, which is also an MPEG type audio file like a MP3 but it uses AAC format, that you can drag in. It gets a little green plus there. You can add that in here and it acts like it's a voice memo that you just recorded. If you go to Transcripts here then you'll see the transcript rather than the wave form. You can see it didn't take long to transcribe that 7 minute 38 second audio file to text. Of course it is not going to be perfect. You're going to get some mistakes, like right here that's a bit of a mistake. But it is going to do a pretty good job. Much better than automatic transcription apps did just a few years ago.

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Now one of the things you can do here is you can select this, just like regular text, and Copy. As a matter of fact you can double click on a word and once you have something selected you can do Command A to select All. At that point you can use Command C to Copy. Now you can paste it into another document. Like here's TextEdit. I can just paste it in there. So, you've got this as regular text now. 

Also you can do some interesting things with it right here in Voice Memos. For instance, if you move the Playback Head it will actually take you to that section here. It actually is working as an alternative to looking at the wave form and you can see it's bolding the word that you're on right now. Not only that, you can click in here and it will jump to the spot in the audio for that word. So if you're reading this and you see something that you want to hear just click where that is and it goes right to it and then you can click Play to play from that point on and then follow along with the words. 

(This is one of the most awe striking failures in the long history of France and Britain). 

There is some other interesting things you can do with it if you have Apple Intelligence on your Mac. So, for instance here I'm going to select a word, Command A to select All, and I can Control click it, right click it, or two-finger click it or just go to Edit and then Writing Tools and then I can choose Summarize, Make Key Points, Make List. Let's try Key Points right here and it is actually going to break this speech into key points here using AI. So it is a good way to summarize something. If you've recorded a hour long meeting, for instance, you can get a quick summary of what went on at that meeting this way. 

You can also Search Playback. You notice if I scroll down there is a little Search button that appears there and I can type something here and it will find it and it will show, you know, 2 of 3 here and I can flip through them all.

But let's go back to problem of the file types. Only the M4A file type was able to get into Voice Memos. So if you've got something that is an MP3 file or a wave file or something else how can you convert it? Well, if you can open up the file in QuickTime Player then you can easily convert it. So I can Control click here on this file and select Open With and then choose QuickTime Player. Once I have it open in QuickTime Player I can go to File and then Export As and choose Audio Only. Then this will Save it you can see as M4A. So I'll save another copy here. So QuickTime Player can be used as an easy way to convert these. 

There's also another way. For some file types you can Control click, right click, or two-finger click on it and then go to Services and under Services look for Encode Selected Audio Files. This is a little quicker way because it is not going to use a separate app. Here you can use high quality iTunes Plus or Spoken Podcasts. These three out of the four use AAC format, you can see right there. So I can switch to Spoken Podcast, continue, and I'll get yet another copy of this in the format that I can use to import in here. If a format can't be converted with either of these two methods you can always use some sort of audio app like Audacity or sometimes there are websites that will convert different audio formats. Use one of those. Whatever you need to do to get it into the M4A AAC format.

Now how about videos. Say you want to transcribe a video. If I tried to drop a video file in here, of course that is not going to work. But I can go and open it with QuickTime Player and just like with other audio files I can Export As and choose Audio Only and then get a M4A file version of this. I can also go and use the Services Menu here and now it is called Encode Selected Video Files. Then what I can choose here from this menu is Audio Only and you can see it is going to do it at AAC format like that. I get yet another version of it. Either one of these two can be dragged into the Voice Memos app and then I can look at the transcript there. This is a little longer so let's let it transcribe. There you go. You get a transcription of that audio. 

Now there is another app that will do this that's on your Mac. The Notes App also got this same transcription functionality in macOS Sequoia. So you can drag a M4A file into a Note. In fact one advantage of the Notes App is it seems to also accept other file types. So it will take a MP3 file, like this, and also bring that in. If I double click it you can see here it will transcribe it and I get a transcription here. It will even do it for this wave file. Here I can bring that in. If I double click that then you can see it will give me a transcription from that format as well. So, you may not have to do file conversion at all if you use the Notes App. It just gets a little messier just taking up space in Notes. But if you're just going to use this here and then you can click this button right there, choose Copy Transcript. 

So it is important to talk about what this doesn't do. What it doesn't do is create a subtitles or captions formatted transcripts. In other words a transcript that has time encoded in it. So you can't use it in a video editing app to add captions, for instance, or upload it to a streaming service to add subtitles that can be turned On or Off. It can't do that because it doesn't have the times for the words that are spoken. It is just one big piece of text. There are some services that can deal with this. YouTube, for instance, you can just upload plain text and it will figure out the times. But most services can't. If you want that kind of transcription where it is going to use a standard format like SRT or VTT, then you're probably going to have to look at a website where a third party app can generate those. But if you just want to get the words out of the audio so you can read them or use them as text, then you can just use this without any additional apps or anything installed on your Mac at all. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.