I like Otter.ai. They were the cheapest, good option, but they recently raised their pricing. I'm not sure how competitive their new pricing is as I'm grandfathered in, but I like them. You can try them for free.
If you have the Adobe Creative Suite around somewhere, Premiere does automated transcription of everything you load into it, and it's pretty good. Advantages: you don't have to upload anything to the cloud, it's unlimited so effectively free if you already have Premiere. It is integrated with video editing, so everything you edit from the original is also transcribed as edited. You can improve the audio quality and re-transcribe if the original audio is weak, or if there are tracks you need to eliminate, and so on. Disadvantages: manual editing of the text is a bit clumsy compared to the cloud service, exporting is limited, and it's not shared automatically. You can export the transcripts, but only in text format, with no control over the formatting. Functional but maybe not ideal. I still use Otter a lot for bulk transcription of material I need to share with others prior to editing.
If the audio is bad and you are not getting a good transcript, try AI noise reduction. You can use very aggressive noise reduction to make bad audio more easily transcribed even if sounds awful to your ear. I like AudoStudio.com but there are many.
Finally, re-reading can be a very effective problem solver. Essentially, you use any voice-to-text trained to your voice, listen to the recording and repeat to your voice-to-text, rather than typing. It's a bit tricky and slower, but can be a lifesaver for heavy accents or highly technical originals. It allows you to correct as you go, and even train the software. The brain is still smarter than AI.
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Tod Hopkins
Hoptod LLC
443-472-5978
todhopkins@me.com
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Original Message:
Sent: 11-02-2023 02:30 PM
From: Keith Cook
Subject: Affordable Video-to-Text Transcription Software
Hello, all. I am working on getting our veteran interviews transcribed and wanted to know if anyone has any recommendations for safe, reliable, and affordable video-to-text transcription software. I am currently using Microsoft Word to transcribe the videos through the "Voice" function, and then going through the interview recording to correct any errors to the AI transcription. While Word does a fairly decent job, the service is limited to 300 minutes of uploaded audio a month, which are going to get eaten fast given that our museum has over a hundred hours worth of interviews that need to be transcribed. Are there any services that allow unlimited transcription work? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
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Keith Cook
Associate Director of Collections and Archives
390th Memorial Museum Foundation
Tucson AZ
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