Why cant I transcribe my voice memos to text on imac?

Alpal52 wrote:

Articles on net say I should be able to transcribe my voice memos to text in the Voice Memos App by selecting "transcribe" but I cant find this option anywhere in the App.

Something like this may be what you saw. Basically the idea is to play back recorded audio on your speakers, while having the Mac listen through a microphone and do voice dictation into a TextEdit document.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/how-transcribe-audio-text-using-dictation-on-mac

The author mentions a variation on this in which you use third-party software to set up an audio loopback that essentially points speakers at a microphone (as far as the Mac is concerned) without playing audio out loud.

So it's not a feature within Voice Memos, but a useful way of leveraging the voice recognition capabilities that already exist separately on the machine.

My iPhone 12 Mini has a voice dictation feature that works in just about any place that you can use the little on-screen keyboard.

Dictate text on iPhone - Apple Support

There might not be a built-in app to convert an already-existing audio recording to text, though. As for macOS, it appears that there has been some form of voice dictation in macOS since High Sierra.

Dictate messages and documents on Mac - Apple Support

Again, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's a built-in app to convert an existing audio recording to text.

The OP's question was very specific and had nothing to do with Dictation.

Where did you see the articles? There is no such option in Voice Memos. There are some third-party apps that offer that feature. One is even called "Transcribe:.

I'm not aware of a method to transcribe voice memos to text without a third-party app on an iPhone either. You can translate a voice memo to another language on an iPhone.