There are also other features too, like being able to control the speed of playback, which can be pretty useful if you come across a word that is difficult to distinguish. Doing so inserts the time stamp into the text, and clicking it jumps straight back to that point in the recording – very handy for listening back to key points. However, more handily than that – you can also add a time stamp by pressing Ctrl+J. It also supports keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+B and Ctrl+I for adding bold or italics to the text. Once you’ve done this, it loads at the top of the screen and you can begin transcribing in the text box provided below.Ĭontrolling playback is easy, you can either use the buttons at the top of the screen to rewind, pause or fast-forward, or you can use keyboard shortcuts (F1, F2 to move forwards/backwards in time and Esc to pause) or jump directly to a point in the timeline. The next step is to load the audio recording into the browser using the ‘Choose Audio File’ button.
To get started, you simply need to fire up your browser of choice (Note: it needs to be a modern browser that supports HTML 5 features, in our testing Safari on Windows didn’t work – shown in the image below), and head to and hit the ‘Start Transcribing’ button. OTranscribe looks to solve this problem by keeping everything contained within the browser, meaning less chopping and changing between open windows and apps, and therefore less chance of distraction. However, the problem with this is that it constantly requires switching between applications on screen, which would be a lesser problem if there weren’t at least 1.6 billion distractions waiting to lure me away from what I was, and should be, doing.