As we explained in another article, you can use Limecraft Transcriber to automatically transcribe your audio or video in minutes. Because it is an automated process, it is prone to errors. In particular, you will notice that proper names and specific vocabulary may not always be accurately recognised.

While the machine generated transcription might be good enough for certain purposes like indexing or pre-cut, you might need a 100% accurate transcript for compliance reasons, publication or preparing subtitles. In these cases you can review and edit the transcript.

To enable editing, toggle the transcriber app from "VIEW" to "EDIT" mode. Now you can correct the transcription, including segmentation, speakers, punctuation and words online.

In EDIT mode, you can modify individual words online, or entire paragraphs by using the edit box. In either case, we will keep the corrections in sync with the media, word-for-word, so a text selection in your transcript will always correspond to proper IN- and OUT points in your media. This makes it easier for you to select quotes and fragments later on.

We explained above how to add timed text to our transcript. What happened behind the scenes is we took the in-point (where you clicked SET IN) and the out point (where you clicked SET OUT) and assigned that to the start of the first word and the end of the last word you typed. Then we guessed the timing of the other words, so all words get linked to a position.

When you play your media, you’ll see the spoken word will be highlighted in the transcript text. It is also possible to seek the player to a given word in the transcript by clicking the word while holding down Ctrl (Cmd if you’re using Mac).

You can put your text cursor in the transcript and type to correct some small mistakes. However, we don’t recommend typing large chunks of text online, as the timecode link will become less and less accurate. It is better to select the wrong text, and use the “Edit text of selection” tool.

Select some words in the transcript. You’ll see some blue buttons at the bottom become active:

Click the “Edit text of selection” button (the pencil icon). A familiar dialog pops up:

Type the correct text and press the Confirm button (shortcut: Enter). The text will be replaced in your transcript, but the timing of the first and last words remain the same.

Sometimes you want to tweak the exact timing of some words. Select some text in the transcript, and press the “Change timing of selection” button at the bottom of the screen (the clock icon). This dialog pops up:

Change the IN and OUT timecode as desired. Press the Preview button, you should end up hearing the text you selected in the transcript.

The “each word has the same duration” button will distribute the available time between IN and OUT evenly over all words (recommended). If you uncheck this box, the words which were longer before using the tool will still be longer after using the tool.

Note: Changing the timing of a selection can introduce a timing overlap with other words in the transcript. The application will notify you about this. When confirming the change, the overlapped words will be removed from your transcript.

Each paragraph in your transcript has an associated speaker. We default to names like ‘Speaker 1’, but you can change the speaker by clicking them and typing a different name:

While typing, you might see a dropdown appear with speaker suggestions. This is a nice way to keep your speaker names consistent.

For multiple paragraphs spoken by the same speaker, we don’t show the speaker name so as not to disturb the flow of the transcript. To reveal the speaker name, either use the F4 button or shortcut, or click the coloured line in front of the paragraph.

You can change the name of a given speaker (in all paragraphs spoken by this speaker) using the Edit Speakers tool. The tool is launched using the button at the top of the transcript text.

The following dialog appears:

With the tool, you can navigate through all speakers using the big grey buttons on the left and right side of the dialog, and give them a name. After giving a speaker a name, don’t forget to press the ‘Save Speaker Name’ button.

To help you identify the speaker, a paragraph of text spoken by this speaker is highlighted in the transcript. You can press the ‘Listen’ button to start playing the paragraph in the video player. Press the ‘Next paragraph’ button to listen to another paragraph spoken by the speaker.