Can voice-recognition software be used to transcribe audiotapes?”
Voice recognition only works for people with very clear diction and only after the VR program has been trained to recognize the particular speaker’s voice (usually, by having the speaker read out a lengthy test passage). And even then, VR programs often mistake similarly sounding words for one another, don’t recognize rare words, and don’t even attempt punctuation. Trying to VR a tape without training the VR program first will not get you very far. At best, you will have a large body of garbled text requiring heavy editing. All in all, I would say, go ahead and transcribe manually.
