My students interviewed their Vice-principal last Friday. However, since they are not yet proficient in spelling and taking notes, they were unable to record down key points mentioned by the vice-principal. After all, it must be a nerve-wracking experience having to talk to the Man himself.

To help them out, I recorded part of the interview on my iPhone. For today’s lesson, the natural step would be to get them to transcribe the conversation. But that would be a nightmare because they would keep getting stuck and not knowing how to proceed further. I anticipate that I would have to do the lion’s share of the work.

To be fair to them, there is a lot of interference as my Vice-principal sometimes asked them to respond to his questions, which upped the difficulty level of transcription.

Before I submitted myself to the gruelling task of transcribing, I decided to explore if I could find a speech-to-text app that could do the job for me.

Firstly, I sent the recording from my iPhone to WhatsApp.

Next, I needed to convert the format of my recording from AAC to WAV. That’s because the speech-to-text app I was eyeing only accepts WAV files.

Having overcome this hurdle, I uploaded my interview WAV file on the website, but to no avail. Turned out that it was too big. Undeterred, I immediately sourced for a WAV compressor website and did the needful.

Finally, I trimmed my bulky file down to an appropriate size. I enthusiastically uploaded it to TurboScribe. I waited with bated breath. Despite being in an air-conditioned room, I felt my body heat rising.

Before long, a transcript was unraveled in front of my eyes. I could even export it in the form of a PDF or Word document.

I heaved a huge sigh of relief. Now, my students could focus on the more value-added work of analysing my vice-principal’s responses and representing them in continuous prose.

Happy to learn something new today!