Dragon NaturallySpeaking (also known as Dragon), is a speech recognition software package that allows speech to text conversions. After training the program to your voice, it can be quite useful in captioning because you can have it run while you make your videos, thus having a transcript of what you discussed.
Below is a video walk through of how you can create a transcript using Dragon.
Steps
- Retrieve a training text from Dragon Naturally Speaking close to the subject matter of the course. Or read the recording live to Dragon. If you do it live you can skip steps 2-4.
- Read and record this text either as an MP3 or an MP4 file.
- If the recording is in MP4 file format, separate audio and video by using VLC player and save the audio file.
- Have Dragon Naturally Speaking train the profile that is associated with the speaker.
Use of Profile for Transcription
- After recording a video lecture, separate the audio from video by converting the MP4 into a MP3. Although many different tools are available to execute the task, VLC player proves to take the shortest time.
- Have Dragon Naturally Speaking transcribe the MP3 audio file by going to tools ->transcribe recording.
- Once Dragon finishes transcribing, listen to the audio and make corrections on the transcription pad of Dragon. You may copy and paste into Word and make corrections there. Once you are done with the corrections, save the file in RTF of TXT format.
- The transcription task is completed. However, take an extra step and feed the corrected file back to Dragon to further train the software. Continuous training of the software with the corrected transcript files prove to reduce the time required for the future audio transcriptions and the time required for correction of the transcription. To do so go to vocabulary -> learn from specific documents.
- After retraining Dragon, you will want to add captions. The easiest way to do so is to upload the MP4 into YouTube and use you updated transcript from Dragon to sync the timing of the captions. When captions are synced you may use YouTube to host your video or you can download it as a MP4 with closed captions.