Transcription Software

Descript

This service is richly featured. It offers transcription and video editing functionality. As with DeepGram and AssemblyAI, accuracy is about the same, but Descript also has an excellent editor that allows you to correct the transcripts and maintain time synchronisation.

The free plan gives you 3/hrs, and the priced tiers have fixed hours per tier but the service offers other video/audio editing features as well. Even if you just considered cost per hour, it's cheaper than the straight transcription services.

And just for reference, you can BYO transcription and that won't count towards your transcription hours but you'll still be able to use the other plan entitlements.

autoEdit

I plan to write a longer post about this later. Even though I can't use it for my purposes, I think it's wonderful, and I have no doubt that this work is what a lot of the popular video transcript editing services are based on. In fact, I've seen an article by one service that says they dissected it as part of their development process.

autoEdit is an open source application with built-in integration with DeepSpeech (sketchy) and AssemblyAI for transcription but also provides a paper-editing and qualitative analysis workflow for crafting interviews. The paper-edits can also be exported as an EDL (edit decision list) and used in other video editing software.

Conceptually, it's very good. I very much like the paper-editing and qualitative analysis integration side of it. Unfortunately, the transcript editor isn't very good at managing corrections with time synchronisation, and fixing diarisation attributions also causes it to fall out of time.

The paper-editing side is great and allows you to tag sections of the transcript which you can use to identify themes or key quotes which are linkable to other recordings in a project. However, due to the way projects and transcripts are stored in the backend, the app runs very slow once you've loaded a bunch of transcripts into a single project, and the paper-edit feature fails to load at all.

If you have small projects with only a few interviews in each, this is great. If you have corrected transcripts, with a little scripting, you can also manually import them into the app so that you can use the paper-editing functionality.