Here, a test audio file has been opened in Apple's QuickTime Player. Our last piece of setup is to prepare an audio player to play your audio file. Open your text editor, and create a new document. With the Dictation settings configured, you'll now need to choose a text editor, such as MacOS's built-in editor TextEdit, as the destination for the transcribed text content. Earlier versions of MacOS and non-English recordings must include punctuation words in the audio in order to correctly break up the transcribed text and avoid errors. If you're on MacOS 13 (Ventura) or newer, this section also includes an 'Auto-punctuation' feature that will attempt to break up content into intelligible sentences. Here, “Transcription Device” has been configured for input. Here, you need to open the 'Microphone source' drop-down and select the virtual device created in the steps above. Scroll down to near the bottom of the list of options and select the Keyboard icon, then scroll down to the Dictation section. Once you've created your virtual device, you need to set it as the input within the Dictation settings.Ĭlick the Apple menu in the upper left of your screen, then select System Settings. Configure Dictation's input device setting With the device now configured, you can actually quit Loopback since even with it closed, this virtual device will still be present and available on your system. This device won't need the Pass-Thru source which is included by default, so remove it by clicking once to highlight it, then pressing the Delete button.Īdd the application you'll be using to play back your source audio file by clicking the (+) button next to the Sources header.įor this example, we'll use “QuickTime Player” to play back the audio file we want to transcribe. To begin, you'll first need to create a Loopback virtual audio device, which will route the audio you want to be transcribed into the Mac's Dictation system.Ĭlick the New Virtual Device button in the bottom left corner of teh Loopback window to create a new device, and give it a descriptive name, like “Transcription Device”. Loopback can route audio from a playback application into the Mac's built-in dictation system, which will then transcribe the audio. On its own, the OS's Dictation system doesn't allow you to transcribe from pre-recorded audio files.įortunately, the addition of Loopback makes it possible to transcribe from audio files. However, this feature is only built for live audio, brought into the Mac via a microphone.

MacOS includes a powerful Dictation feature, which can transcribe spoken words to audio.

Voice dictation for mac