Are you looking for an AI transcription tool? Read through our comprehensive assessment of popular options to find out what will work best for you.
With the rise of remote and hybrid work, workers are participating in more and more meetings over the course of their workday. Transcription software takes on an even greater role in this business environment.
Without the right transcription tool, employees may miss out on deadlines or other important details of key deliverables. They may misunderstand what colleagues may have assumed was clear and cannot go back to review a complete record. They may fail to follow through on client or stakeholder requests.
In short, the right transcription tool is tantamount to success. Unfortunately, the market is currently flooded with a wave of transcription software. These are often solutions wrapped around the AI model of another company, such as OpenAI, with some value-added features thrown on top.
It’s crucial to evaluate these tools, so that employees can choose the solution that is truly best for them. This article is the first in a two-part series that will assess some of the more popular options in this space.
Speechtext.ai’s utility is right there in its brand name: It converts files with speech across multiple supported languages into text. Users can import either audio or video. As part of the conversion process, Speechtext.ai provides speaker identification and automatic punctuation. One of the selling points of Speechtext.ai compared to other transcription tools is the ability to choose a domain-specific AI model. This will help Speechtext.ai identify jargon words and other specialized language that may be specific to a given field. To this end, customers have praised Speechtext.ai’s ability to handle medical data.
Although Speechtext.ai offers a free trial, its pay-as-you-go model may be expensive for some. Its standard tier, which it claims is its most popular, is US$49 for only 990 transcription minutes. While the flexibility to choose a domain-specific AI model is novel, the platform does not have other features that would support experts. For example, doctors may want to jointly collaborate over a patient’s case file, but Speechtext.ai has no provisions for natively sharing or commenting on transcriptions.
Riverside is unique in that it integrates remote recording with transcription. Because the other speaker is recorded locally from his own device, the resulting file is of much higher quality than one recorded through a computer. This results in what Riverside claims is a 99-percent accuracy, and any errors can be quickly edited in the text-based editor. Riverside thus promotes its fit for a variety of business use cases, including internal communications, webinars, virtual conferences, podcasts, and learning and development.
When you dig deeper into Riverside, its focus appears to be podcasting. Most of the value-added features are podcasting-focused, such as the separation of voice and audio tracks in post-production and the lack of compression in such files. Riverside appears to have merely tacked on additional use cases to appeal to a broader audience, but its core product seems optimized for podcasters. It may be ideal for a business built around podcasting, but not so appropriate for businesses with more generalized transcription needs.
Auris AI is a solid transcription tool, one that supports importing from several file formats, including .mp3, .wav, and .mp4. It can transcribe over 25 languages, including many that are overlooked by competitors, such as Dutch, Malay, Hindi, and Vietnamese. It can also support some code-switching, such as between English and Tagalog, the two national languages of the Philippines. Auris AI can also handle subtitling, which may be ideal for businesses in need of audio-visual presentations, such as explainer videos.
The output of Auris AI is highly dependent on the quality of the input audio. For high quality audio, it boasts of an accuracy rate between 85 percent to 95 percent. For low quality audio, which are any files with heavy background noise, overlapping speakers, or speakers far from the microphone, Auris AI warns that the transcription may be unusable. Given that other AI tools have devised solutions for issues such as overlapping speakers, Auris AI seems like a step behind technologically. Due to this gap, Auris AI seems to push users to a sister site, Bynuvo, and encourage users to combine AI with the latter’s human localization. Using multiple tools for transcription would not only be operationally cumbersome, but expensive.
Vocol.ai bills itself as a voice collaboration platform rather than just a transcription tool. Its features deliver on this promise: Like the other solutions on this list, Vocol.ai offers comprehensive tools for transcription, including speaker identification and support for multiple languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and English. Vocol.ai will produce a transcription as well as an AI-generated summary and even action items for quicker review and alignment. Most crucially, teammates can easily collaborate across the transcription, summary, or action items. They can share these files, tag colleagues, and comment on items. These features transform the files into living documents that advance true collaboration.
Many workers will be familiar with transcription tools. Many workers will also be familiar with collaboration tools. But comparatively fewer will be familiar with voice collaboration platforms, given that Vocol.ai is pioneering the category. This innovation is a double-edged sword: Early adopters will gain advantages in efficiency over competitors by turbo-charging their transcription with collaboration features. On the other hand, getting to this point may require some internal market education. One employee or department may have to champion the idea of Vocol.ai to the rest of the company to get them on board.
While the need for accurate transcription may be the initial pain point that workers experience, it is not the only one. Employees in search of the right tool thus need to think outside of the box. Instead of confining their search to only “transcription tools” or “transcription software,” either of which will yield a list of middling AI-based tools, they should seek solutions that combine their needs in both transcription and collaboration.
From this perspective, Vocol.ai presents a compelling option. While it matches and even exceeds all the standard transcription features, it shines where it is needed the most: collaboration. The platform will turn its AI-generated transcriptions, summaries, and action items into a digital hub: Colleagues will gather, communicate, and most importantly, produce quality work.
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