By Adriana Linares
Hello, this is Adriana Linares. I’m your Technology and Practice Management Advisor for the San Diego County bar. Today we’re going to do a Tech Tip in a Tenth, about two features that I really appreciate in Microsoft Word and hope you do too. As a reminder, if you’re a member of the SDCBA, you can always make an appointment to meet with me and ask your questions or get a little bit of help with anything related to technology and practice management. So, let’s get started.
I’m in Microsoft 365. The two features I want to share with you today are dictation and transcription, which are built into Microsoft 365. You must be a Microsoft 365 subscriber in order to see these two buttons. So, as you can see, I’m here in Microsoft Word. I’m going to look at the home ribbon go. All the way over to the right-hand side and look for this dictate and transcribe button. You will see that dictate and transcribe button in Microsoft Word for PC, for the Mac and even word on the web if you happen to be using it in your browser.
Let’s start with the dictate button. Pretty easy, does exactly what it sounds like once you click it on. You’ll notice this little toolbar pops up. Of course, you’ve got to have a microphone, and in my opinion, it’s always better to have a microphone with a boom attached to it versus using the microphone that’s in your camera or attached to your computer. Period. The quality is always going to be better. Period. You can think about and probably try to easily use a lot of the dictation lingo that you’re used to using from other services, exclamation point, new line. See how that works? Question mark. Of course, it’s not always going to get everything right and you might have to go back and fix a few things, but at least you’ve got a document started. You’re able to probably think more freely and hopefully create a wonderful legal document through the power of dictation. We’ll just leave that there and I can always go back and fix it. I just went ahead and closed out dictation to end it.
You can always turn it back on by simply clicking the dictate button or on Windows. The keyboard shortcut is the Windows Key Plus H. You can always use that. To open dictation just about anywhere. I’m going to close this out. The other tool I want to make sure and share with you is that of the transcribe tool, which is also right underneath dictate. You’ll find it here. So I’m going to go ahead and click transcribe, and a pane is going to open up on the right hand side. It’s going to allow me to either upload a video or start a new recording and then also transcribe at the same time. I think this is going to be more useful to many attorneys using the upload audio function.
So let me show you how this works. I’m going to click upload audio. File Explorer is going to open. I’m going to find either the video or the audio file that I’m looking to transcribe. I’ve got a great video here from connect with council from the SDL Oris. I’m going to click “open.” As soon as I do that, you’re going to notice that it’s going to start uploading the file to OneDrive and it’s going to start running the dictation. This is actually a pretty big file. It’s going to take it a minute, so let’s go ahead and open this other document where I have already run the transcription on this. So the end result will look like this. It’s going to tell you your transcription is saved, that you can close this pane, and the transcription is actually saved into the document that you uploaded the video to, and that’s what it’s telling you. You can come back here later.
So you’ll see here that now I’ve got the name of the file with the link to it, because remember it uploaded it to a specific place in OneDrive. I can actually start playing the file and follow along. You’ll notice that it has broken down the three speakers into speaker 1-2 and three here, so at any time I can click on the little pencil to rename speaker one to who it is. And then check the box to let it know that all of speaker one is named Elizabeth. Click the check mark to confirm, then I’m going to come to speaker two. Change this to Michelle. Change all. Confirm. And then down here, Mr. James Estino. Was the attorney that was the guest here, and I’m going to change him to James. Change all three and check the box. Now from here I can do things like copy and paste the video or excuse me copy and then hit the plus sign. Pop that paragraph into my document or I can add the entire document, just the text speakers names with timestamps without the speaker names, or with speakers and timestamps and it will drop the entire transcription into the video. Excuse me into the document and at this point you will have to do some formatting. But I think it does a pretty good job and I think this is a really nice feature and an added benefit that we get with Microsoft 365.
I hope this tip was helpful, and don’t forget if you’re a member of the bar and I can help you in any way, you can always make an appointment to meet with me by going to sdca.org/techappointment.