FWIW if you are interested in such tooling consider also soffice and pandoc which have (as far as I can tell) similar features but have been existing for years now and are not related to Microsoft.

Edit: not related to Microsoft AND Google, seems the transcription aspect (which IMHO is still weird in that context but OK) is done via Google servers, cf https://lemmy.ml/post/23629310/15586865

[–] haverholm@kbin.earth 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

The single exception to this (which is actually buried fairly deep in the feature list) is the audio transcription tool. I didn't take a closer look at what is used to perform this, but at least it's not "just" document conversion like pandoc.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 4 points 6 days ago (2 children)

audio transcription tool

Thanks for the clarification but I'm a bit confused here, like audio transcription, STT, done by e.g. Whisper? If so what's the use case? When I think of Office documents audio transcription is not something I have in mind.

[–] haverholm@kbin.earth 2 points 6 days ago

I'm not completely clear either on how Microsoft have implemented this previously. As I said, I didn't look very deep into the repository.

If these are indeed other Python projects they piled together, as others suggest, I'd be happy to hear what speech recognition library this might've built on.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

PS: related, asked on Github too https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/issues/20#issuecomment-2544630753

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 6 days ago

You should open a fresh issue for questions like that instead of asking on an unrelated one.