The IOD team has generated over 500 articles for our customers over the past year, all of which have been original and unique in the world of cloud computing. Our technical writers and evangelists are measured by their efficiency and ability to maintain quality and accuracy. As a result, we are constantly on the lookout for ways to enhance our production capabilities, making sure to arm our staff with tools that make their jobs easier, including our own Ideation and Google docs to WordPress features. In this article, we would like to share an important tool with you that we feel every writer should know about.
Transcribing can be an overwhelming and strenuous activity if the process consists of tirelessly moving between browser windows, an audio player, and a word processor. It’s easy to get distracted with too many open windows, which can lead to inaccurate transcriptions. Luckily, IOD’s content team has stumbled upon an extremely user-friendly and useful transcription tool called oTranscribe. The open source web app, created by Elliot Bentley, makes transcribing straightforward and almost effortless. It allows you to upload and listen to an audio or video file of your choice, and take notes or transcribe with its built in online word processor, all in one window. It offers a bunch of practical features that make transcription a more fluid and pleasant experience than what you were used to.
Some of oTranscribe’s Distinguished Features
This app comes with more than the basic ‘pause’, ‘rewind’, and ‘fast-forward’ capabilities that you would expect. You can easily adjust playback to seven different speeds; The ability to slow down the audio comes especially in handy if speakers have a quick tongue, or speak unclearly, making seemingly inaudible segments very possible to transcribe.
Another particularly favorable feature of ours is the ability to add timestamps while transcribing, which, once clicked on, will navigate to the corresponding part within the recording. We found it especially useful when noting important points to revisit, as well as parts that may have been unclear and require an additional listen. oTranscribe also saves your text as you write, so you’ll never have to experience that terrible moment where you’ve realized that you haven’t saved your file right before a crash, or that you haven’t exported your text before accidentally closing a browser window. This, unfortunately, is somewhere we’ve all been with various software or web-based word processors. If you do accidentally quit your browser or close your browser window while working, you can reload oTranscribe and all of your text will appear just as you left it. Just make sure that you don’t clear your browser’s cache before doing so! As for file types, you can upload a variety of audio files (mp3, ogg, webm, and wav), video files (mp4, ogg, and webm), and also use audio from YouTube videos by simply entering the link.
We, at IOD (iamondemand), often work with large files of various types, and the uploading process has always been very quick and smooth for us. We particularly love the clearly defined keyboard shortcuts which allow our hands to stay put on the keyboard, exponentially increasing our productivity.
Is There a Better Option?
It seems that oTranscribe doesn’t have any looming competitors. We’ve read some great reviews for another transcriber’s web app, Transcribe, but registering and a yearly fee are required before use (after a 7 day free trial). There are some transcribing softwares out there that are available for download with a fee, and you can always choose to hire someone to do the work for you with a transcribing service. However, considering all of its features, oTranscribe is an extremely appealing choice, and is the optimal one for us. It creates an ideal environment for transcription as a free, web-based tool, with no need to sign up, and no need to download any software to your computer. You can finally focus on completing those transcriptions without getting overwhelmed by too many windows, and increase your speed and productivity. This makes the IOD content team’s trusted go-to transcription tool oTranscribe.
