11 Best AI Transcription Tools in 2024
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Artificial intelligence (AI) transcription tools offer many industries, including digital publishing, the means to quickly and accurately convert audio and video files into text.
The need for transcription services has been around almost as long as the first portable audio recording devices began appearing. And the publishing sector isn’t the only service-based industry that has needed voice-based recordings transcribed.
The US transcription industry was valued at $25.98 billion in 2022. While the industry was built on the back of human transcribers, the process was slow, costly and prone to human errors. The advent of AI, however, means it’s now possible to transcribe large volumes of audiovisual content within a matter of minutes with surprising accuracy, and at a fraction of the cost.
Join us as we look at the best AI transcription tools to streamline workflows, enhance content accessibility and boost productivity.
AI transcription is the act of using AI-based tools to transcribe audio or audiovisual inputs to text. Users upload their audio or video files to a tool that can convert the file’s contents to text.
While it might take a human transcriber several hours to convert an hour of audio to text, AI transcription tools can complete the process in minutes. These tools can also convert audio to text in real time.
AI transcription tools achieve this by leveraging a technology known as automatic speech recognition (ASR). Put very simply, ASR works in a two-step process:
The entire process happens quickly, resulting in real-time transcription of streaming audio, and conversion of large audio files to text within minutes.
While the medical and legal professions have traditionally been the heaviest users of professional transcription services, the advent of AI has made speech-to-text possible for a wide range of industries and services.
Some of these include:
AI transcription software can not only transcribe live lectures and interactive sessions to text, it also helps to store and organize that text just like physical notes. For instance, the software can highlight the most important parts of a discussion or lecture, allowing students to revisit key sections later.
AI transcription tools, when leveraged for business meetings, can actually help cut down on the number of business meetings employees need to attend. This is because, in addition to meeting transcripts and recordings, the tools can provide summaries and insights that can be shared across the organization immediately after a call ends.
These tools are also capable of integrating with commonly used communication channels such as Slack to ensure everybody is in sync. They can further integrate with task management tools such as Notion so that voice commands or tasks defined during the meeting are automatically delegated to the person responsible. The result is faster and more efficient knowledge sharing, leading to fewer meetings.
Several AI transcription tools provide advanced data analysis and visualization capabilities that allow transcribed text to be understood and shared in ways that are important for researchers.
For instance, word clouds are a visualization technique that some of the tools on our list offer. With a word cloud, researchers can visualize which keywords in a given audio or video recording are the most important, measured by the frequency of their occurrence. This in turn allows them to uncover important insights from their collected data.
There are several AI transcription services available in the market today, meaning choosing the right tool boils down to evaluating it based on several criteria. These include:
Please note that because these are not deep-dive reviews, we’ve listed the following platforms alphabetically rather than in order of preference.
Beey is widely considered to be one of best AI transcription tools owing to its budget-friendliness and excellent customer service.
The platform supports all major audio and video formats including MP4, MP3, WAV, AAC (MP4 audio), VORBIS and OPUS. While Beey does allow for live transcription of audio, this feature is still in beta mode, so there may be some unpredictability with the results.
Beey also cautions its users that its results are dependent on the quality of recorded audio. Disturbances such as background noise can also impact its quality.
On the whole, Beey claims a modest 90% accuracy for its AI transcription tool, which seems both realistic and honest. It was also in line with the results we found when we tested the app.
A screenshot of Beey transcribing a YouTube video. Source: Beey
Beey has two pricing tiers:
For users looking for a free version, Beey offers free transcription for the first 30 minutes. This makes Beey one of the most economical tools on the list.
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Meetgeek is one of the most popular AI transcription tools with over 10,000 teams across the world using it.
One of its strongest points is its ability to provide detailed analytics for each meeting, as well for a set of meetings over time. Users can see metrics such as meeting engagement, burnout and more.
A useful Meetgeek feature, especially for businesses is its ability to allow for custom branding of meeting videos and transcriptions with company logo and colors. The tool also allows managers to control views and layouts, so that different elements from a meeting page are visible only to a predefined audience, such as customers or only certain employees.
Meetgeek integrates with all major workflow tools such as Slack, Gdrive, Trello, and with more than 2,000 apps through Zapier.
A screenshot of Meetgeek transcribing an uploaded audio file. On the right hand side, it also displays highlights in real time. Source: Meetgeek
The tool has four pricing plans:
For businesses unsure of whether or not to invest in a paid tool, Meetgeek also provides a handy ROI calculator that allows businesses to estimate just how much they can expect to save by using it.
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Notta is a Japanese AI transcription tool that can transcribe an hour of audio in five minutes along with a concise summary. The company’s roster of clients boasts of impressive names including PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Salesforce and Grammarly.
Notta provides a high degree of organizational control, allowing access restriction by IP address while giving users the ability to set external sharing limits. It’s also capable of capturing screen recordings, besides transcribing audio/video and generating summaries.
Notta’s Japanese pedigree is conspicuous on its website, with some content only appearing in Japanese even on its English-language site. This makes navigation for non-Japanese speakers a little tricky. Pricing plans are also listed in Japanese yen, instead of currencies more familiar to western customers such as the US dollar or the euro.
Notta offers four pricing plans:
Its pricing makes Notta one of the most budget-friendly options on this list.
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Otter is a tool designed to make the most out of live meetings, be they sales calls or online classes.
For instance, OtterPilot for Sales, Otter’s specialized sales tool, automatically extracts sales insights from recordings, generates follow up emails and pushes call notes to Salesforce.
Another interesting Otter feature is its Slack app. While most other tools covered in the list come with the standard Android and iOS apps along with Chrome extensions, Otter also comes with a Slack app that shares real time updates from live meetings into the team Slack channel, ensuring everyone is in the loop.
Otter also connects easily with Dropbox so that any audio or video dropped into the Otter app folder in Dropbox gets automatically transcribed and synced with Otter.
A screenshot of Otter transcribing an entire episode of the TV show Veep. Source: Otter
Otter offers four pricing plans:
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Rev is different from many of the other entries reviewed here, in that it offers both human and AI-powered transcription.
In addition to its AI-powered tool, it has a team of professionals who transcribe audio or video into searchable text in under 12 hours. This is of great help in cases where the recorded audio quality is too poor for AI to process, or where users want the highest level of accuracy.
Its AI-powered transcription service is available at cheaper rates and faster turnaround times. Rev guarantees a more than 90% accuracy for this service, which seems to be in line with industry standards.
Rev comes with a bucket of free apps and tools including a voice recorder app, an in-browser audio cutter and trimmer tool and an audio transcription app. It also allows for both open and closed captioning that captures not just speech in a video but also sound effects, atmospherics and musical cues
Rev’s pricing plans are based on the service a user needs.
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Scribie is different from all the other entries in this list in that it doesn’t offer a pure AI-based transcription tool, but rather a human verified AI-transcription service.
Scribie candidly acknowledges the limitations of AI-based transcription, and follows a two-step transcription process. Its human transcribers are first provided with an automated transcript prepared by an AI tool, which they then have to verify and correct to greater than 99% accuracy.
Scribie has a pool of more than 50,000 transcribers spread out across time zones to ensure timely delivery of transcripts to its customers, though it doesn’t make any promises when it comes to delivery times.Scribie has a flat rate of $1.25 per minute with a 24 hour turnaround time and guarantees a 99% accuracy rate, which is the highest on the list.
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Sonix is a tool that claims many firsts for itself. It claims to be the world’s first audio word processor, allowing text to be edited within a web browser. It also claims to have the world’s first “SEO-friendly media player”, although in practice this translates to generating a text version of an audio or video file — a functionality that every AI transcription tool possesses today.
Sonix is capable of transcribing content with a 95-97% accuracy, which is higher than most other tools. It supports almost all major video conferencing tools including Zoom, Google Meets, Loom, Skype, and Microsoft Teams.
A screenshot of Sonix transcribing a YouTube video. Source: Sonix
Sonix has three pricing plans:
Sonix doesn’t offer a free version, but does have a trial version with 30 minutes of free transcription. Signing up for the trial version, however, requires users to provide their credit card details.
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Speak is a transcription tool that specializes in helping qualitative researchers and marketers derive better insights from their data.
To this end, it provides users with powerful data visualization capabilities that enable users to see the output of their transcribed recordings in multiple visual and shareable forms such as word clouds, charts and custom reports. Speak promises to do all this with an accuracy of over 95% for its AI-based tool.
For researchers who need even greater accuracy, or even more detailed insights and analysis, Speak also provides transcription by human experts delivered within 48 hours with a 99% accuracy.
Speak is also capable of named entity recognition, allowing for efficient extraction and categorization of the most important insights from the transcription, including keywords and trends.
When it comes to security, Speak is among the most secure tools on the market, with capabilities such as PII (personally identifiable information) redaction that allows users to mask or remove sensitive content, and HIPAA compliance.
A screenshot of Speak transcribing a YouTube video of Gary Neville interviewing David Beckham. Source: Speak.ai
Speak has two pricing plans:
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Taption is a transcription tool that prides itself on its high degree of accuracy and lightning fast transcription speed.
During our tests we found that Taption transcribes audio up to an accuracy of well over 90%. However, when it comes to speed, Taption is well ahead of the competition. It transcribed a 20-minute YouTube video we fed it in under 2 minutes, complete with speaker labeling.
Another advantage Taption has over its competitors is its high level of transcription accuracy when it comes to the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean or CJK languages, where most other tools struggle to generate accurate transcriptions.
Taption has three pricing plans:
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Transkriptor is a versatile tool that comes in Android and iOS apps, a Google Chrome extension for desktop users and a web page service. It allows users to access three services with a single subscription — text to speech, speech to text and an AI-powered writing assistant
Transkriptor claims to be capable of 99% accuracy, although it is hard to determine how reliable that claim is, given that the best results for pure AI speech-to-text transcription rarely go past 97%.
When it comes to transcription speed, the app claims to transcribe audio in about half the time of the file. What this means in practice is that it can transcribe a 20-minute audio file in roughly 10 minutes.
In this case, we found that Transkriptor exceeded user expectations, managing to transcribe a 12 minute YouTube file in about 4 minutes.
A screenshot of Transkriptor transcribing a YouTube video by speaker. Source: Transkription
Transkriptor has two pricing plans:
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Trint is an AI transcription tool that has been designed for the media industry. It was founded in 2014 by Emmy Award winning war correspondent Jeff Koffman who wanted to go past the limitations of manual transcription.
Little wonder, then, that Trint claims an impressive roster of clients from the world of journalism, including BBC, Washington Post and Financial Times.
Trint allows users to search multiple transcripts to pull quotes for podcasts, articles, scripts and soundbites. This allows for the creation of more authentic stories and compelling narratives. Trint is also a highly collaborative tool allowing for sharing, commenting, and editing of content across teams, while providing the ability to implement strict access control over documents for security.
Trint’s has three pricing plans
Overall, Trint’s pricing makes it a slightly more expensive option compared to other entries on this list.
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AI transcription tools are becoming more powerful, and all the tools on this list are capable of generating transcriptions with more than 90% accuracy within minutes.
At the same time, we’ve also seen that for the highest accuracy levels, many businesses still prefer human transcriptions, assisted by AI. This indicates that there is still some way for AI technology to go before it completely replaces human input.
That said, AI transcription tools, when used under human supervision, can help businesses save enormously on time and costs. The tools covered in this list are applicable across a wide range of transcription scenarios, ranging from live business meetings to qualitative researchFor those looking for even more options, we’ve compiled a longer list of the 15 best transcription software that covers several other tools.
