First introduced at Ignite 2019, Microsoft’s Office Mobile app combines the best aspects of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Forms to give users a complete on-the-go productivity suite. While Office Mobile currently does a great job for mobile users, it has become even more useful with a recent update. Microsoft now has added a powerful tool to allow users to capture and transcribe voice recordings in Office Mobile, and it’s reminiscent of the Google Recorder app. Today we are going to test this new feature and you will learn how to use Office Mobile’s new voice notes tool.
Transcribe voice notes in Microsoft Office Mobile (2021)
According to Microsoft, the new Voice Notes feature is available on the Office Mobile app for Android, running version 16.0.14026.20096 or later. And the device language must be set to English (United States). I tried the feature on Office Mobile version 16.0.14131.20036. So let’s see how the voice notes feature works.
Steps to Access Microsoft Office Mobile Voice Notes Tool
1. Open the Microsoft Office application (Free, with in-app purchases) on your Android device and press the “+” button present in the center of the bottom navigation bar.
2. When the context menu appears, choose “Voice” in the Quick Capture section. This option will take you to the voice recording interface.
3. When you are in the recording user interface, tap the microphone icon down to start a new voice recording.
4. When you are in the recording interface, you will see the transcription of your speech in real time. You can tap the microphone icon again to pause or press “Done” to finish voice recording.
5.Microsoft will now save your voice recording to your OneDrive account. You should also note that you need an active internet connection for the live transcription to work as expected. However, you will get a transcript after syncing the recording with OneDrive. It’s different from the Google Recorder app, where transcription also works offline.
Edit transcribed text in Office Mobile
If Office Mobile incorrectly predicted some of the words in the transcript, you can make corrections manually. Here’s how:
1. Open a voice recording and press the “Edit” button present in the lower left corner of the screen.
2. You can now edit the transcript and press “Done” to save changes. In case you were wondering, deleting specific portions of the text will not erase the corresponding audio from the recorded file.
Share transcribed text or voice notes with others
You can share the voice recording as an audio file or export the transcript to a Word document. Here’s how to start:
1. From the voice recording interface, press the “Share” button in the lower right corner.
2. Now you will see the option to export or share the file. If you want the transcription as a Word document, tap “Word document“. On the next page, tap “Yes” to confirm.
3. Similarly, if you want to share the audio file, tap on “Audio file” and tap on “Share as link” to generate the voice note access link. You can also invite people to access the file by adding their email addresses in the “Invite people to this file” text box.
4. Before generating the link, you can choose to allow edit access or set the file to read-only. Choose one of these options and you will be taken to the share sheet to share the link. Others can then open the link to access the recording.
Record voice notes with transcription on Microsoft Office
This is how you can use Microsoft’s latest tool to capture and share voice notes with transcription on mobile devices. If you are a Microsoft 365 subscriber, Microsoft says this feature will also partition and transcribe input from different speakers based on their identity. Try the feature and let us know your experience in the comments.
