I'd like to transcribe a screencast. Do you have a software suggestion?

Asked by phaedryx (6129

) October 31st, 2011

There is a (free) screencast that I’d like to transcribe for a friend. It is about 15 minutes long and I’d rather not type the entire thing out. Also, this is a one-time thing so I’d rather not pay for something I won’t use much (the cheaper the better).

My computers run either OS X or Linux, but I could start up a Windows VM if I needed to.

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1 Answer

Is the screencast just speech or are there other things on the soundtrack, music, effects, anything like that, particularly over the voices? I’ve used Dragon Naturally Speaking, and the version for the Mac, Dictate, is over $140. Mac OSX has its own built-in voice recognition software but I’ve never use it. But, if you have an iPhone, the people at Nuance, who make Dragon and Dictate, have a free app called Dragon that works pretty well. Voice recognition technology is actually pretty difficult. But the iPhone app works very well, but if the screencast has a lot of background noise it could cause problem but the transcript will require manual tweaking anyway. If you can get major chunks of it that would be something at least.

lillycoyote (24865

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