Microsoft Word can finally do more with your spoken words. After teasing transcription support last year, Microsoft is officially bringing the feature to Word for the web today, giving users an easy way to capture the text from their conversations. finally arrived, albeit in a limited form, as it initially supports just one language and is only available to Office 365 users on the web.
If your job requires extensive work with documents or routinely organizing meeting notes, transcribing can be an invaluable tool to save time or catch that important detail that inadvertently got overlooked the first time.
Microsoft has now added support for transcription in Word for Office 365 subscribers. The web app, where Transcribe is available initially, uses the company’s Azure Cognitive Services AI to record and convert voice to text in real time and also works for audio and video files uploaded via your PC browser.
Compared to other transcription services like Otter.ai or Google’s Live Caption, Microsoft’s transcription is pretty limited in terms of functionality and availability as it only supports English (EN-US) for now and requires using Microsoft Edge or Chrome to work. Microsoft plans to add this feature in mobile versions of Office later this year, but didn’t specify when (and if) the service will come to its desktop apps.
You’ll need a Microsoft 365 subscription to use the feature, naturally, and you’re also limited to five hours of transcription per month and 200MB files for uploads. For now, Microsoft is allowing unlimited recording time for transcriptions made within Word. The feature is only available on Word for the web right now, though Microsoft says it’s coming to the Word Android and iOS apps by the end of the year. It’s something I’d definitely love to see integrated into desktop Word apps eventually.
Microsoft hasn’t forgotten about Word’s dictate feature either, which is better suited to jotting down text directly from your voice. You can now use voice commands while dictating to adjust formatting, add emojis, or even pause dictation to answer a phone call. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but the upgrade makes Word’s solution more like dedicated software like Dragon Naturally Speaking. The enhanced dictation is available free to Word users on the web and mobile, and Microsoft says it’ll be available on the Word Mac and PC apps for Microsoft 365 users by the end of the year.