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I've been looking for, and testing, various automated transcription APIs over the years and never found one that was high-quality for videos of interviews (back
by mkempe 9y ago
I've been looking for, and testing, various automated transcription APIs over the years and never found one that was high-quality for videos of interviews (background noise, people don't talk in full sentences, people use filler sounds). I'd love to find something usable -- and plan to try this one as well. Human transcription is laborious, slow, and expensive. I've toyed with the idea of a human clean-up pass after the automated transcription, but that's still labor intensive.
- tabeth 9y agoPerhaps the task you're trying to complete is just inherently laborious, slow and expensive, then? Given that humans frequently have trouble understanding one another, it's very unlikely you'll ever encounter an API that can do 100%, or even 90% accurate transcription across environments. --- Isn't transcription inherently an opinionated activity, as well? In terms of how to transcribe utterances, words spoken in other languages when the main language is another, etc?
- wpietri 9y agoAgreed. I'm looking at transcribing some of my talks, and even if I had humans do the work I'd be doing my own editing pass. Speech is just different than writing; one needs a good mental model of both speaker and listener to make all the right editorial choices. Automated recognition strikes me as a good place to start, though, especially for applications like search.
- ghaff 9y agoYeah, I've used transcription to generate speaker notes or even give me the start of a blog post. It doesn't need to be anywhere near perfect. It's just sometimes easier/faster to get a rough dump of a presentation you're comfortable giving rather than starting with a blank sheet of paper.
- ghaff 9y agoEven inexpensive human transcription works pretty well though assuming good audio and recordings that aren't difficult for other reasons (strong accents, etc.) I usually get my podcasts transcribed by a service that is basically a quality control front-end for Mechanical Turk and I need to do minimal cleanup. I'll be interested to see how this works in comparison when it's more broadly available. I'm guessing it will be sufficiently worse that it won't be worth using for this purpose. If it's cheap enough though I could see using it for other recordings that I don't normally get transcribed today.
- mkempe 9y agoWould you mind sharing which MT-based service you're using for podcast transcription?
- ghaff 9y agoCastingWords. I've been very happy with them for my purposes. They tend to even get various CamelCase product spellings and the like correct even if I forget to put them in the transcriber notes. I usually get the 6-day $1.50/min service partly because I need the turnaround and partly because, anecdotally, the quality also goes up a bit when you pay for the premium rates. I do maybe a couple dozen 20 minute podcasts a year so the costs are negligible.
- mkempe 9y agoThanks. I'm dealing with hours of interviews per day.
- mslate 9y agoCan you share about your use-case? I have a very similar transcription need--feel free to contact me at my email in profile
- nmcfarl 9y agoThanks for the plug, we love happy customers. btw: We no longer use MTurk, we have our own crowd now.