Manual transcription is officially in the past – at least for the English language. With AI advances over the past few years, in most cases transcribing interviews manually no longer makes sense.

The Fix prepared a roundup of transcription tools for journalists that are either free or relatively affordable. We focused on tools best suited for working with long audio, such as interview recordings or conference speeches, but we also included one bonus tool that might be useful for quick transcription of personal audio notes.

Note – we included only tools we at The Fix are using ourselves. While this means they have been tested by the author and our wider team, it also entails some limitations, such as a focus on services that work well for English. If you have feedback or would like to suggest your tool, reach out to us at newsroom@thefix.media

Happy Scribe – the best and the most expensive

Created by two co-founders in Barcelona in 2017, Happy Scribe is a platform for transcription and subtitling. It offers AI-generated transcription for €12, as well as human-made transcription for cases that require 99% accuracy.

Benefits:

High accuracy of machine-generated transcription
Convenient interface that makes it easy to work with the text directly on the platform and includes a lot of useful features
A set of built-in AI-powered features that allow to work upon the text you’ve transcribed (like generate a short bullet-point summary of your interview or create a quiz based on the contents)

Drawbacks / limitations:

At a price point of €12 per hour (with discounts for bulk purchases), Happy Scribe might be too expensive, particularly when you need to work with a large volume of audio.

*Happy Scribe interface (screenshot via Happy Scribe)*

Google Pinpoint – a knowledge management tool for reporters

Launched in 2020 as part of the Google News Initiative, Google Pinpoint is a set of tools for journalists.

Benefits:

Google Pinpoint is much more than just a transcription tool, it offers a range of research and knowledge management features for journalists. For example, you can extract and organise structured data from the interviews you transcribe.
The service is free to use for journalists and supports multiple languages.

Drawbacks / limitations:

Based on our experience, the accuracy of transcription is lower than with other services listed in this article
Google is notorious for closing down non-essential services

*Google Pinpoint interface (screenshot via Google Pinpoint)*

Good Tape – a neat tool from journalists for journalists

Good Tape was launched in 2022 by Danish outlet Zetland. It offers a free version that allows three 90-minute transcriptions monthly, as well as a paid subscription that includes 20 hours of transcription along with perks like quicker transcription for €15.

Benefits:

A good combination of the quality of transcription and an affordable price
The service supports multiple European languages

Drawbacks / limitations:

The service is relatively new, so it has less additional functionality than Happy Scribe or Google Pinpoint

*Good Tape interface (screenshot via Good Tape)*

Bonus – ChatGPT audio input

You definitely know of ChatGPT, but chances are you haven’t used its voice-to-text system, which is freely available in the mobile app.

This option is useful to quickly capture an audio note for yourself so you don’t forget that idea that came to you in the shower – and then continue using ChatGPT capabilities to further work on it (or just copy and paste the text to use in another app).

Benefits:

High-quality transcription in English that handles accents and works well with non-native speakers (transcription also works with other languages, but the quality is lower)
Direct integration with other functionality ChatGPT provides

Drawbacks / limitations:

As we mentioned above, this function is useful for audio notes, not for long audio like interviews
While individual chats are private, by default they will be used to train OpenAI’s models. It’s possible to opt out of this in settings

On the image: ChatGPT audio input interface (screenshot via ChatGPT Android app)

Source of the cover photo: https://unsplash.com/

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