Dictation

I saw a notice on the Morningside Facebook page that a lady had a friend who was doing her PhD and was looking for someone to transcribe oral interviews in the written versions.  I phoned the lady and she gave me the number of the PhD Student.  The PhD student set me up with an account to send me the audio recordings.  She said she could pay $100 for an hour of audio.  She said she had 10 interviews to do.  She sent me an example audio file and an example of what it looked like transcribed and she sent me a confidentiality form.  I tried to transcribe the audio and I couldn’t type fast enough even when I slowed down the recording.  I was talking to my brother in law about it and he suggested there might be some voice to text software I could use.  So I looked up apps on my phone and tried one.  I also remembered that we had tried voice to text on Facebook messenger and I found there was a voice to text feature on Gmail.  I tried to use the voice to text app through the speakers of my computer but it didn’t work.  So I tried listening to the audio recording and repeating it into the phone app and that seemed to work fairly well but I found the listening was slow because I often had to stop and repeat parts and also after it was in text, I had to upload it to the cloud and download it into Word and edit while listening to the audio again.  The PhD student wanted me to transcribe all the 'ums' and 'uhs' and pauses and giggles.  Barb thought that was stupid but the PhD student said she needed the nuance. It would probably take me more than 3 hours to transcribe an hour of recording which didn’t make the $100 an hour sound so good if it was $100 for 3 or more hours but I signed the confidentiality agreement and sent it to the PhD student.  She replied that she would send me  an audio file soon.  When I told Sarah about it, Sarah said she would pay me $100 not to do it.  She thought it was stupid.  I waited and the PhD student never sent me anything and I never got back to her.  So it looks like it is not going to happen and I am okay with that.