Introducing A New Free Transcription Tool For Journalists Especially

The common task of a Ghanaian journalist who wants to transcribe a recording of a speech will require that journalist to open a text editor, start an audio player and know keyboard commands in order to control playback. The combination of these tasks is more of a herculean task for the journalist who cannot afford to hire a transcriber at a fee. Besides the tedious task is the precious time spent going to-and-fro a recorded speech and open windows.

For those journalists who go through this pain regularly, the time has come to heave a sigh of relief. oTranscribe is committed to making transcription a stress free activity. oTranscribe is a web application that will take the pain out of transcribing recorded interviews. This means, you will need not to be changing between open windows and applications. You will get the chance to control the audio playback on the same page where the typing is being done.

How it works

Logon on to www.oTranscribe.com in a browser that supports HTML 5 and click on 'start transcribing' button.

Now, load the audio recording into the browser using the 'choose audio file' button. Your audio can now be played at the top of the typing page. Controlling playback is easy, you can either use the buttons at the top of the screen to rewind, pause or fast-forward, or you can use keyboard shortcuts (F1, F2  to move forwards/backwards in time and Esc to pause) or jump directly to a point in the timeline.

Below the loaded audio recording is a text box where you can start transcribing.

Cool and nice features

The speed of the playback can be controlled. This will be useful when you want to differentiate certain words that sound similar. F3 and F4 are the keyboard shortcuts for controlling the speed.

You can add a time stamp by pressing Ctrl+J. This will insert the time stamp into the text, and clicking it jumps straight back to that point in the recording.

Your finished transcription can be saved to Google Drive or exported. You can simply copy the finished work and paste it into a Word document.

You don't have to worry about privacy as your audio files are not on their servers but locally on your computer.

If you accidentally close a work-in-progress, don't worry, just reopen oTranscribe and you will get back your typed text.

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