Best Transcription Software [2023]
Transcription, also known as speech-to-text or automatic speech recognition, is software that converts your audio or video files into text documents. This software can transcribe a multitude of audio or video files, including interviews, conference calls, webinars, YouTube videos, and more.
Using transcription software is highly beneficial if you want to increase the accessibility of your content across all platforms. This is also used in multitasking, where you can dictate the software to produce text documents to boost productivity. Transcription software is becoming very popular in various industries.
What Are the Benefits of Transcription Software?
Transcription software has a lot of benefits to impact your work positively. Here are some of the key benefits you enjoy with transcription software. Take a look.
Transcription Increases Accessibility
Many of your audio or video content might not be accessible to people with challenged abilities. When you transcribe those content, it becomes accessible to a broader audience, impacting the rank of your content on search engines.
And most platforms nowadays encourage providing transcriptions with your audio or video content to make them accessible to all types of audiences. If you are producing content for multiple platforms, generating transcriptions for all of them at one go is bliss.
Transcription Software Saves Time and Money
If you need to transcribe an audio file manually, completing the transcription might take hours of tiring work. On the other hand, transcription software is capable of doing the same job in a fraction of the time. So, you save a lot of time and hassle while using transcription software.
Plus, hiring a professional transcriptionist may be very expensive, depending on the expertise and experience of the professional. In such cases, you can deploy a transcription to complete the job. Most of this software is subscription based, so you need to spend only a few dimes to transcribe an audio or video file. When you are dealing with tons of transcription regularly, transcription software turns out to be a far more economical solution.
Software Is More Accurate Than Manual Transcription
When transcribing a big file manually, individuals can lose their focus at times, resulting in multiple errors in the transcribed document. Checking the document and fixing the errors are time-consuming. But if you use software for the task, it can efficiently transcribe any large file with high accuracy.
Though some software may show inaccuracies depending on the audio quality, most transcription software is designed to deliver accurate output. And this software is being continuously improved and trained to understand speech better and deliver more accurate texts.
Transcription Helps Overcome Language Barriers
Be it a podcast or YouTube video, not all audiences might be familiar with the language or dialect in the videos. When you transcribe the content, the text document in a standard language helps the audience to overcome language barriers and consume the content more easily. This can be highly beneficial to creators who want to reach a global audience.
Transcriptions Boost Productivity
As you don’t need to listen to large audio or video files to transcribe them, you can utilize the time to make more content for the audience. You can also avoid proofreading or other tasks related to transcribing. As a result, your productivity skyrockets with the help of transcription software.
Transcriptions Work as A Backup
When you upload audio or video content to various platforms, it can sometimes be compromised or lost. Some of these contents are pretty expensive and time-consuming to make. So, creating those contents from scratch would be a great loss of time and money.
When you have the content transcriptions available, you don’t need to work from the ground up. So, these documents function as a backup should the necessities occur.
Transcription Makes Sharing Easier
Sharing audio or video content can be difficult sometimes, especially if you have a slow internet connection. But if you have the transcription, you can easily share the text with anyone, even with slow internet connections. It is also easier for cross-platform or cross-device sharing. For example, the text document is way smaller than the original audio or video files, and you can simply send the document as a text message.
How Does Transcription Software Work?
A transcription software simply listens to the audio or video files you provide and then turns those sounds into text using its language processing tools. With the development of AI and ML, the software can now efficiently recognize the sound pattern of different words. They then match those patterns with the existing words in their dictionaries to write the text.
Besides, the software can learn itself, meaning it updates the dictionary every time it gets a new sound pattern for a new word or dialect. The software can also understand the sound patterns of multiple languages so that you can transcribe in whatever language you want.
Here is a step-by-step process in which the software works.
- You upload the audio or video file and tell the software to transcribe.
- The software creates a draft of the transcription.
- You have the ability to edit the transcription to fine-tune it.
What Features Should I Look for in Transcription Software?
Before choosing transcription software, check if the software has the following features.
- Level of Accuracy: The software you use for transcription should be highly accurate. It should be at least 95% accurate in transcribing audio or video.
- Allowed File Size: Before you feed a large file to the software, you should check the file size or text length limit of the software.
- Transcription Speed: Check how much time the software needs to transcribe the average size you frequently do.
- Supported File Formats: Ensure the software supports multiple file formats.
- Mobile App: It can help you transcribe on the go.
- Extra Features: Check for timestamps or other necessary features. Also, the software should have essential integrations.
How Much Does Transcription Software Cost?
It depends on the pricing model of the software. The charge can be more or less $1 per minute if you use a time-based subscription. Low-tier subscriptions with a limited number of files might cost anywhere from $12 to $25 per month. But if you go higher, it will cost about $75-100 per month.