Are you looking for a transcription tool that provides more value? Read our comparison of popular transcription solutions to choose the best one.
In part 1 of this series, we compared several examples of transcription software. All but one are focused entirely on transcription: Users upload a file to the platform and wait for the AI model to produce a transcription.
The problem with this approach is that very few business cases are transcription only. In most cases, colleagues need to not only generate a transcription, but collaborate based on this document.
Colleagues may need to natively share transcriptions for approval or feedback, align on important action items, or comment on specific parts to discuss issues further or obtain clarification. This next batch of tools compete in this space: These solutions provide value-added features to enhance collaboration.
Since these tools integrate even deeper into a team’s workflows, it is more crucial to choose the best one.
Offering integration with Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and other popular meeting tools, Fireflies.ai streamlines the meeting process. The solution automatically transcribes each meeting and users can leverage AI-powered search to identify important items, such as tasks. Users can also take advantage of comments, pins, and soundbites, which can be shared like a Loom, to colleagues.
In addition to speaker identification, Fireflies.ai goes a step further, offering data on each speaker’s time, sentiment, and other analytics that may improve how meetings are conducted. With a robust feature suite, it’s no wonder that Fireflies.ai already counts over 100,000 organizations as users.
The neutral-to-negative reviews on popular software review site, G2, noted several common issues. One user complained that the summary feature was counter-productive, as it produced as many action items as there were minutes in the meeting. “I spend more time [unpacking] it and trying to make sense of it than I would writing the notes myself,” he wrote.
Others noted different issues: The bot would not join meetings when invited, the model would mis-identify speakers, and it had trouble transcribing different accents. Another user complained about the responsiveness of customer support, which may be a particularly glaring issue given that Fireflies.ai wants organizations to build their knowledge base around their platform.
Like Fireflies.ai, Otter.ai joins remote meetings as a virtual note-taker. The company claims that its model can write notes and summarize meetings up to 30 times faster, and it offers integrations with the most popular meeting tools. One notable feature is its ability to perform live summaries of ongoing meetings. This feature is a big assistance to attendees who join late due to time conflicts or overlapping schedules. Now instead of wasting time manually filling them in on what happened, they can read the summary and participate meaningfully for the remainder of the time.
The platform boasts of high transcription accuracy and offers additional features for certain functions, such as sales. Business developers can automate their follow-up emails through Otter.ai, saving them time they can spend on more valuable parts of the sales process, such as rapport building or deal negotiation.
While Otter.ai offers a free plan, this tier seems like a token offering: The vast majority of features an enterprise will need is gated behind paid versions. Its business tier, for example, starts at US$35 per user per month, when paid monthly. This tier is the first that unlocks usage analytics that aid with business operations, which other solutions already offer on lower plans.
On G2, several users complained about privacy issues: The bot attended meetings whether it was invited or not. Others lamented predatory billing: The company frequently charged more than it had quoted the client for.
trint has a bold claim: It can provide up to 99 percent accuracy across the 40 languages it supports for transcription. Despite this impressive accuracy, trint has robust post-meeting features. Users can search transcripts, and when encountering a possible error, verify them via playback and then edit as needed. Users can also collaborate in real-time with access shared across drives and abilities like highlighting and commenting. Compared to other products, trint has a high emphasis on security: All servers are located in the United States or the European Union, and the company is ISO27001 certified.
Although marketed as an AI-powered transcription platform, trint seems to focus on storytelling use cases, perhaps owing to the roots of its founder, journalist Jeff Kofman. For example, users have editorial tools to pull quotes from transcripts for use in articles, podcasts, and other similar content. While these features may be great for editorial teams, it may be less effective for business teams that will want more generalized collaboration features.
The fact that the product skews heavily toward media brands is evident in its marquee clients, which include the likes of BBC, Washington Post, Associated Press, Financial Times, and Thomson Reuters.
Vocol.ai is the premiere solution of its kind. Rather than position itself as a transcription software, the company calls itself a “voice collaboration platform.” The product delivers in this regard. Offering support for Japanese, Chinese, and English, Vocol.ai can transcribe audio and video files, distinguish between speakers, and punctuate conversations accurately. Most crucially, Vocol.ai uses AI to generate summaries, topics and action items, and you can even translate the transcript into more than 25 languages. Since these features are powered by generative AI, the summaries and action items are accurate and concise, allowing attendees and their colleagues to align on key items and next steps.
Compared to other transcription software, Vocol.ai’s collaboration features are the broadest, empowering any type of business or team to use them effectively. These include native filesharing, highlighting of important items, commenting, and tagging. Despite having the most robust feature suite, Vocol.ai has one of the most accessible pricing. In addition to a basic plan that is forever free, Vocol.ai offers pay-as-you-go tiers built around the consumption of credits, which can be topped-up when exhausted. This pricing is ideal in contrast to the solutions that only offer paid tiers, or the solutions that offer a free tier stripped to the bare-bones in functionality.
Businesses with a very narrow use case, such as journalists interviewing experts, may not need all the value-added features of Vocol.ai. The platform is best suited to enterprise teams that have diverse and dynamic collaboration needs based on their remote and hybrid meetings.
Furthermore, Vocol.ai's affordable pricing may be perceived negatively because some business leaders may assume that Vocol.ai will have fewer features than its more expensive competitors. Company champions must make a thorough investigation and side-by-side comparison to show otherwise.
With the rise of powerful AI models, transcription is only the first step. Software solutions must emphasize how organizations and teams can collaborate based on these documents, rather than collect dust in an email inbox.
The next generation of tools is ambitious in this regard, but most still fall short of their goals. The one exception is Vocol.ai, which falls in the perfect Goldilocks zone. Its transcription and collaboration features are broad enough in scope to serve any size business, in any sector, across any geography. At the same time, these tools are powerful enough to serve the unique needs of any team.
While Vocol.ai still has many features to add, according to its roadmap, the platform should be the go-to choice for any business that wants to thrive at the intersection of transcription and collaboration.
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