Your first transcript

Transcription is the one tool here that usually works on the first attempt, which is why this lesson is short. Get one transcript out with everything left alone, then read the next lesson to find out which of the settings you skipped were actually costing you something.

Getting the audio in

There are 3 ways to hand over audio today, and a fourth tab that is not doing the work yet. Start with a file — it is the only route that does not depend on somebody else's site staying up.

Run it with the defaults

The defaults are chosen to be right for the common case. Language is on Auto-detect, Accuracy is on Standard, and both Speaker Diarization and Word Timestamps start on. That combination gets you a labelled, word-timed transcript of most recordings without a single decision.

• Standard accuracy: Fast, and accurate for most audio: a clear single speaker, a decent microphone, ordinary vocabulary.
• Speaker Diarization on: the transcript comes back split by who is talking, rather than as one undivided block.
• Word Timestamps on: every word carries its own start and end, which is what captions and search need later.

Read it back

Open the transcript and follow a minute of it against the audio. You are looking for three specific things, and each one points at a different setting in the next lesson.

1. 01

   Are the words right?

   Names, jargon, numbers and accents are where a transcript goes wrong. If ordinary sentences are fine but every proper noun is mangled, that is the Accuracy control talking.

2. 02

   Are the speakers right?

   Two people merged into one, or one person split across two labels, is the diarization guessing. You can tell it how many voices to expect — the next lesson covers when that helps.

3. 03

   Do the times line up?

   If you are going to make captions, check a few segment boundaries against the audio now rather than after you have exported an SRT.

That is a transcript. It lives in your history, it is editable, and it exports in 7 formats — but none of that is worth doing until the words underneath are right, which is the next lesson.