It’s important to pass on information in a precise and convenient way, otherwise, this information might lose value and the effort put into preserving it. It is easier to pass on information in written form, too – the reader will most likely retain more of it than the listener.
Overall, making audible data take the form of text has always been a way to go in history, science and literature.
A lot of professionals today need tools to convert the spoken word into a written one, to optimize the efficiency of their work. This is why we want to go over some of the best audio to text tools on the market and find the advantages that each one gives.
Why do you need free audio to text converter?
To the question of why anyone would need access to free audio to text converter, the answers may vary:
- Save time
Often audio notes take a lot less time to make, you can check the information on average transcription speed here. Our brains work a lot faster than our hands and fingers, so saving time on taking notes frees time for additional research, experiments, or just an extra coffee break. But then you’d need to transcribe those audio notes manually.
This is where a sound to text converter comes in handy. You do the easy work, it does the rest at the time most convenient for you – you could be sleeping or taking a jog while the tool is converting audio to text.
- Processing information
It is easier to process information in the form of text than audio. It’s also easier to share it in this format. The more information you need to share, the more time, energy and focus it would require from the recipient. Everybody has their individual capacity for reading and listening, but it’s common for the reading one to be rather higher than that for absorbing information in audio form.
So, to record things and then transcribe audio file to text using one of the available voice converters is to save time, energy and improve the percentage of the retained information.
- Easy content creation
As mentioned before, creating information/content in audio format is faster than doing it in written form. If you’re a content creator, chances are, you’re going to need text one way or the other – because even non-textual forms of content need to be accompanied by text nowadays.
Videos and movies need subtitles. It’s pretty ironic, but even in the times where visual content has been overtaking our daily personal and professional lives, all types of content need text – articles, social media posts, subtitles, presentations, interviews, – they all need the text in one form or the other.
- Searchability
One of the giant advantages of text over audio is also that text is easily searchable. You can ‘Ctrl+F’ any text and find whatever you need in it without having to read through it all, while it’s not exactly the same with audio.
If you recorded a 2-hour interview and remember that at some point your interviewee mentioned a certain word or topic, but you have no idea at what part of the interview it happened, you’d probably have to listen to the whole interview again to find that bit, but instead, you can use a speech to text translator online and voila, you can search the text and find the bit you need in less than a minute.
Who needs to convert audio files to text?
The answer is: A lot of us.
Marketers can use audio to text converter to help increase the reach of a product and to generate more content. By creating subtitles for videos, for instance, one can reach a wider international audience. Given the searchability benefit, translating audio to text can help the SEO for your website.
Researchers often deal with audio resources as well as produce voice notes – by converting both into the text they can save time and effort. At the same time, it can make handovers of information easier.
Students often desperately need the tools to transcribe audio files to text and more importantly they need it to be free. Since lectures are given in the spoken form and it’s nearly impossible to write things down and listen at the same time, a free online transcription tool is invaluable for the “broke student” folk.
They can calmly listen to the professor and intake information while recording class lecture and then just convert audio to text online using free audio to text converter.
Teachers can use the tool for similar purposes – to record lectures and distribute them to students or use the texts of converted audio files to create easily accessible archives for themselves, colleagues and students.
Journalists can use audio to text converter to transcribe their interviews and navigate them easily. As mentioned before, the text is searchable while audio files aren’t. So using a tool like Audext they can easily convert mp3 to text for free.
Podcasters deal with an abyss of audio for a living and having no transcriptions of their work is a potential disaster waiting to happen. So, those who record podcasts are insistently advised to transcribe their audio materials. Things pile up, and yet again, it’s hard to find any type of reference if you don’t have your work in text form.
To help convert their podcasts into scripts they would have to use one of those voice converters.
Video creators could benefit from free online transcription when they want to create subtitles online for their videos. Offering subtitles for your videos impacts the accessibility of your content to a bigger variety of viewers – they can break the language barriers for your videos or give access to your videos to people with hearing disabilities.
Businesses create a massive load of content, too, and it doesn’t have to be marketing content or content that a business puts out for the client. Content is generated within companies for the use of those very companies, a lot of it is in audio format and needs to be recorded, then stored.
Customer calls, conference calls, meeting minutes – all these can amount to hours of audio files that are almost impossible to store in audio format for a long time. Using a free sound to text tool can help improve the whole company’s efficiency.
Best audio to text converter online
- Audext
This software uses AI to convert audio to text fast and at the most competitive price on the market.
You can use this speech to text translator online to help you transcribe and systemize audio notes, interviews, lectures, meetings and more. This application saves users all over the world a lot of time. Audext works with 10 languages and many English accents.
Transcription with Audext can also save your business a lot of money. It will do the work faster than any human, charge less than the average market price, and free time from employees who deal with manual transcription, allowing them to invest that time into other tasks to benefit the company.
- Sonix
This is a tool that can help you with automated transcription, translation, and subtitles. First things first, however – even though there is a free trial available (30 minutes free) past that, this service isn’t the cheapest and that can make a big difference if you need to convert audio to text on a regular basis.
However, the site offers Premium and Enterprise subscriptions apart from their standard pay-as-you-go plan for the clients that can benefit from a consistent flow of transcription. Naturally, the standard plan lacks a lot of additional features that are offered on the Premium and Enterprise plans.
- Trint
By using the advanced ASR (automated speech recognition) and NLP (natural language processing), Trint claims that with good audio and clear speech the software can reach 99% accuracy with its transcripts.
However, with a free 7-day trial available, this service is even more expensive than the previous, starting at $48 per month. Trint is a tool for those who need converting audio to text on a daily basis and in high volumes.
The pros here are the speed, the quality of the editing, the language availability and format flexibility upon completion, while the cons are definitely the prices and the fact that the tool still struggles with long and complex audio and video files.
- HappyScribe
HappyScribe offers “automatic” and “professional” as two options for their sound to text transcription and subtitle services. The service is easier to use because unlike the others that offer subscriptions mostly, on HappyScribe you can get your audio priced by the minute.
They also use an in-site wallet that allows for easier checkout. Podcasters, video editors, journalists, and researchers like this tool for the quick and easy uploads, the 119 languages and accents available to choose from and for how fast your order can be ready, however for those who are searching for a subscription, this will not be a desirable option since the site doesn’t do plans and has limited file-sharing capabilities
Best free audio converter online
For those who cannot or will not pay for their transcription, there are a couple of decent sound-to-text transcription tools out there on the interwebs.
- IBM Watson Transcribe Audio Demo
This is an in-built tool of the IBM Watson website that offers a demo version of their speech-to-text converter.
The tool shows off its speech recognition skills in the following languages: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Arabic.
To convert audio using the demo version of the tool you’d have to:
- Use your microphone.
- Upload a prerecorded audio file in MP3, MPEG, WAV, FLAC or OPUS.
To give you a taste of what the tool can do, the demo version has two sample audio files that you can play.
It also supports a “keywords to spot,” feature which allows the user to highlight/flag any keywords in the output text.
- Bear File Audio to Text Converter
The Bear File Converter will help you convert mp3 to text online. It supports MP3, WAV, OGG, WMA and other formats – you can look those up on their website.
It was first created and introduced with CMU Sphinx, a speech recognition toolkit from CMU. In 2017 the Baidu audio recognition engine was added to the systems it supports.
The conversion process is maximally simplified – you need to upload your audio, click convert and then download the text file that got created.
Converting a 1MB file would take about 45 seconds, but since it’s a free version, the maximum file size for an upload should be up to 3 MB. The tool also only recognizes English speech for now.
- 360 Audio to Text Converter
360 Converter is a FoxMV product developed back in 2012 and another tool to help you convert audio to text online for free. This one works with direct uploads from your PC, URLs and even cloud uploads from Google Drive or Dropbox.
360 Converter supports speech conversion in English, French, Chinese and Hindi.
Should I try voice converters?
As we’ve established previously, manual transcription of lectures, interviews, meetings and calls is quite a painful activity, so pretty much any business, student, researcher, lawyer or journalist could use audio to text converter in their arsenal of tools.
Voice-to-text apps are great for text messages, notes to self and generally casual transcription, but lengthy audios and videos require a more professional approach.
This is why having the technologies of sound to text and speech recognition develop fast and constantly has allowed us to save ourselves a lot of time on transcription.
Some of the best transcription software was developed and is offered by the experts at Audext. The app converts speech to text online using advanced AI technology and is extremely cost-effective while being about 200 times faster than manual transcription.
The tool has plans with and without a subscription, as well as an Enterprise plan for businesses that can be customized to the company’s needs. The pricing is the most competitive on the market and by choosing a subscription that suits you you can lower the price of the translations down to $5 an hour which is unavailable anywhere else.
A free trial is also available with your plan, so you can try and convert mp3 to text free of charge. Other mainstream formats are also acceptable.
Audext is safe, fast, functional, modest in pricing and supports everything you might require to convert video or audio to text online. You can start a free trial on the site or contact the staff to discuss individual plans.