Bloggers, journalists, youtubers, lawyers, students, podcasters – many people like the idea of transcribing audio to text. This saves time and money and allows a more structured way of accessing data. Audio to text transcription allows to skip faster through the hours of audio data and write down the important dates, events and other pieces of information.
1. GGLOT.com
This online audio to text transcription service is built from the ground up to provide cost effective audio transcription service for all sorts of people. Its automatic transcription software is capable of recognizing speakers, write down sentences with proper punctuation and supports 60 unique languages such as English, Spanish, Russian, French, German, Korean, Dutch, Danish and so on.
2. SpeechPad.ru
This online service built by Russian enthusiasts allows a simpler way of dictating speech which it converts to text. It work in Russian and English languages. It’s Free to do, but would require registration if you plan to process large files. This website is largely a utility website where you can dictate what you want to be written. You need to pronounce punctuation symbols as the transcription software won’t pick them up out of a context.
3. Dictation.io
Developed in India, this online service allows to dictate your sentences and transcribe them into text on the fly. It only works with Google Chrome as it uses the native Google API for speech recognition. Other web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox are not supported.
Audio transcription – in a nutshell, it is a process of conversion of audio into text. It is facilitated whether by human transcribers or automatic software. While humans are better at quality, machines are cheaper and faster. The recent trend in artificial intelligence is to shift from human transcription toward automatic translation tools.
Transcription is a process of converting audio file into text. Transcriber does not change the meaning and does it verbatim in the same language. While translation is a process of translating a meaning of a file from one language to another.
It depends on the quality of the original audio file, background noise, music, accents of speakers, slang, jargon and grammar. Human transcription takes ten time longer than the length of an audio file. It takes time to listen to the file at least once, then to type it on a keyboard, correct mistakes, apply timecodes and save. On the other hand, automatic transcription tool such as GGLOT could transcribe audio to text twice faster than the length of an audio file.
There are three ways to convert audio file to text: manual, automatic and outsourcing. On websites such as Upwork, you can find a freelancer who can take the job of transcribing audio to text and returning the text file in a certain amount of time. It is the most expensive and slowest option. It takes tremendous amount of time to screen for a right individual before you find a good one. With $1/minute, your 60 minute audio file may cost you $60 plus the freelance marketplace fees. And it will take 24-36 hours to get it back.
Manual transcription by yourself is the cheapest option as all the work you will be doing yourself: listening to audio, recording it in text, correcting, saving. The biggest drawback is the opportunity cost. You might be better off focusing on more productive and mission critical tasks rather than doing the manual and tedious work.
Automatic transcription is the best choice of the two. It is faster and less expensive. You can quickly correct the errors in the visual editor and save the text files or subtitles for future reuse. Gglot provides the best in class automatic transcription service at wholesale prices.