You Ask, I Answer: Best Voice Transcription Services?

In today's episode, Heidi asks, what is the best and cheapest way to transcribe audio files into text? And which tool do I use? So good question. The answer to this question is going to depend very heavily on your level of skill and your budget. For most people in most circumstances, including myself, I recommend and use otter.ai.

I only pulled up my phone here. Otter.ai is very, very straightforward. You either load an audio file into it or you um you record live. So in fact, I'm going to turn on the uh live recording now. And what it's doing is it's listening to me, and as it listens to me, it is starting to transcribe in re in real time or near real time, which is very, very handy.

Uh I use this a ton on my end for conference calls, because I will say something like, Oh yeah, yeah, we can get you that report on Tuesday, and I'm like, later on, what what did I say? So um, because the way you can split audio on a desktop computer, you can record only your end of the conversation. Uh for if you need to record the entire conversation, remember that you have to be in compliance with your uh localities or or countries uh wiretapping laws because it is technically a form of wiretapping. Um also allows you to take uh live audio feeds if there's enough good audio in the room. Like if you're at a conference and you're sitting like right in front of the speaker, you can uh have it running and transcribe, and then actually uh Simon Lau, one of the the head folks there showed me you can actually uh highlight and share the snippet along with the audio uh back to social media, which is pretty cool.

Pricing on this is terrific. Pricing is about uh ten dollars a month for I believe it's a hundred hours of recorded audio, which unless you are literally having somebody follow you around all day long and just record everything, that should be more than enough for almost everybody who is uh attending meetings, going to conferences, and even doing daily videos and podcasts. So that's the best solution that I think for most people in most circumstances. Now, there are exceptions. Uh if you really, really, really care about performance and you have the technical skill to do so, uh you may want to build a custom model that is trained on your voice specifically, and you would do something that was something like um IBM Watson um speech to text.

You can do it with Google Cloud Voice, you can do it with Amazon AWS Recognition, and all these services allow you to build uh custom trained models on your voice. They are actually less expensive uh in some cases than otter, but they require you to have extensive knowledge of Python because that is the language that you write the code in to interface with these services. So that's uh a case where not many people will have the technical skill uh but could take advantage of uh the the customization. A really good use case for that would be if you have very complex custom lexicons uh and you have a speaking voice that is in some way slightly different or more unusual, in which an off-the-shelf application is not gonna perform as well. So uh if you have, for example, a strong accent, uh, you would probably want to do a custom model.

Um, even if you're speaking English, uh you'd still want to do a custom model, or especially if you speak languages other than like mainstream languages, like most of these apps are released in the American and the UK market and are tuned on the English language. If you are speaking like Pashtun uh or Swahili or Tsosa, most of these apps are not going to work for you. Um and you would need to go the custom modeling route to work with that. If you don't flat out don't have the money at all, you could build a an open source deep learning neural network on your laptop and use some of the freely available code out there to build that network. And that's that's an even greater leap beyond when it comes to uh the technical skill that you need.

So most people, most circumstances, otter.ai. I think it is the best app out there for people depending on on the market, for some folks who have very special needs, uh custom pre-trained voice models with uh IBM or Amazon or Google, and then for those folks who have the highest level of technical skill or the zero, like complete zero budget, but you have a laptop that for some strange reason has a GPU that you can use, um, you would do the open source deep learning neural network. I would say for the most part, stick with the vendors because one of the things that's happening right now in the uh in the natural language recognition space is that the technology is evolving quickly. And again, if this is not your core competency as a business, there's no reason for you to be building your own and then trying to keep up with the software. I don't even do that, and and AI and machine learning is the core of of our business, but for the most part, everything off the shelf is really really is good enough.

I also like um the fact that Otter allows you to share transcripts. Um so you can it's it's performs very similarly to like Google Docs and Google Drive. If you've done a meeting with somebody, like I did this recently in uh in an interview, I said to the interviewer, let's capture the audio and then I'll send you an automated transcript. And I could just send them the link, and it has that sort of dictation style playback where you can uh see the little words going on across the screen and then replay certain sections. And that was super helpful, especially because the uh interviewer English is not their first language, so I have a tendency to speak quickly, and we were talking about some fairly complex stuff.

So they were able to get the transcript to reference for their article. So that's my recommendations um for voice transcription services as of autumn twenty nineteen. The the landscape is always changing, and there are are always services to keep an eye out for and try. Um the best way to compare services on the pricing basis is price per recorded minute. So figure out um or ask as you're dealing with vendors what is your price per recorded minute?

Uh, because some folks will say, like, yeah, yeah, you only get you know, if you're ten dollars a month, you get this, but then it's an extra, you know, four cents a minute, and then when you work out, do all the math and and how many minutes you're allowed. I did this recently, somebody was pitching me saying, like, for podcasters, we've got the best transcription service, you know, highest uh accuracy rates and stuff, and it's only you know X dollars a month. And on the surface, it sounded good. I read their terms of service, though, and I was like, mmm, that is literally one hundred twenty-eight times more uh in terms of cost per recorded minute than otter. And I don't think their transcription's that much better.

I it's not 128 times better, and I'm certainly not in a situation where um I would need that level of accuracy. The other thing that really messes people up when they're comparing transcription services is that if you're used to a human transcription service, a human is going to edit out and maybe re even rephrase and tweak your language. A machine will never do that. If you don't speak in the same way that you write, any automated service is going to be a disappointment to you and is going to require more editing because you need you you're expecting the machine to edit for you, and they're not at that point yet. Automated services will take exactly what you give them and spit out almost exactly what uh what they heard.

So if you don't speak as in the same way you write, you're going to do a lot of editing. Um it's not comparable to a human. I personally don't, again, for my use cases, I don't find that the uh cost increase going from you know something like a penny per recorded minute to a dollar per recorded minute. I don't see the justification for that for what I do. But other people who need to have the more, I guess, bespoke uh transcripts, you may still need a human to do the editing, either as part of the transcription process or afterwards.

So keep that in mind as well. Great question. As always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data, analytics, and digital marketing problems?

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