SOLVED: Where To Get Free Online Audio To Text Transcription?

We recently needed to get a 10 minute interview transcribed and I blew an hour testing sites, reading blog but generally going no-where.  There were a great number of people that chimed in with such useful comments as:

Just pay a human to do it

Machine transcription a farse that only exists in TV and Movies

After trying 6 services and find that they all had some major problem (like they would take 10 hours to complete and then only transcribe the first 300 seconds) we tried a few paid services.  The great news is that we found a service that:

  • worked in internet time – i.e. just a few minutes
  • transcribed all of our Audio to Text – not just a small chunk
  • had a VERY low price – just $.14/minute
  • performed the service for FREE – gave us a 30 minute free credit

That service was HappyScribe  If you want to quickly see the results of their work, you can skim through a story we ran on our sister site PartisanIssues.com about NAFTA & Free Trade  HERE .  We did not change a single letter in the audio to text transcription because we wanted to use it as the example in this article.  What you see is what they output.  It is not perfect, but it is very very good.

Note that we were not paid or given ANY incentive by HappyScribe .  We wrote this article because it was so difficult to find a quality transcription service and HappyScribe cost us nothing so we felt a debt we could repay with this story.

View Comments

  • the article is very good and inspiring, because translation using google translate is sometimes not what you want

  • I used to work for one of these websites. The pay is extremely low. You can basically only do it as a hobby unless you're prepared to put hundreds of ours into it.

Published by
Ian Matthews

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