transcription of recordings

[u/Academic-Steak9224]

Hi there. I'm studying journalism and have several recordings—each about an hour long—of interviews and the like. Does anyone know of an app or website that can transcribe audio to text?

[u/Thing_Sea]

How important is accuracy, and are you willing to go through the whole transcript double check the results? Do you have any privacy/confidentiality concerns?

The Whisper STT models are usually good enough, if your audio is pretty clear and understandable. 

If you have a somewhat decent computer, I'd highly recommend a site like this. It runs the actually transcription on your computer's hardware, but the program and code is all provided to the browser, so you don't have to go through the pain of installing random sketchy hard-to-use apps. This solves data privacy and means free unlimited usage, but requires a decent computer (preferably with GPU). https://huggingface.co/spaces/Xenova/whisper-web (One thing to note is that this specific demo is run on-device, but many of the other ones on HuggingFace are hosted and subject to strange limits and privacy)

If you don't have good hardware, and are willing to get a little bit technical, you can sometimes find notebooks in Google Colab that use their more generous computer power.

Other than that, are you willing to pay a little for something? There are a lot of free sites but having hours of audio might hit limits there.

If you don't care too much about confidentiality, I'm happy to run transcription on my machine for free (depends on how many hours of audio we're talking about). 

Are these interviews you conducted, or are you pulling stuff from online for the studying? (I don't really know much about journalism)

[u/mechanicalyammering]

Whisper AI is a free, open source app that can transcribe your audio. Works best in command line. If you can’t run command line, ask an LLM for help.

If you want easy and can pay a little money, Notta.ai does it well

[u/Sirk0w]

Hi, yes I built one and it's free to use up to 2 hours a month (no card needed). It's called vocascript and it handles long recordings well, even if there are multiple speakers and each speaking in a different language. There is also a post transcription verification / quality report that guides you through any problems it found after your transcript is done. Anyway I'm not going to bore you with all the features but I am pretty sure it's right up your alley, so just try it and let me know how it goes.

[u/Sirk0w → u/Sirk0w]

Oh and please note that on the free plan you can only transcribe 25 mins at a time but you can stack them up on one recording pretty easily so that should not be an issue for you as long as you don't go past the monthly limit.