The Best Transcription Apps Have Humans and AI Working Together

Transcription was commoditized on September 21, 2022, when OpenAI launched its open source Whisper transcription models. They're good—97-98% accurate, on average, better than human transcription services in 2018, when Wirecutter's transcription services guide was first published. And they run, for free, locally on your computer, transcribing a minute of audio in under a minute on an Apple M1 CPU or newer.

And yet, to my surprise when I started testing transcription services this year for my debut Wirecutter guide, OpenAI Whisper was merely middle-of-the-pack with transcription. Today, nearly every popular transcription service you could test will be more accurate than they were several years ago, and the best all-around option—GoTranscript—was over 99% accurate, with clean transcriptions so close to perfect that you could publish them with little more than a read-through. The key breakthrough is that many services, GoTranscript included, are now using AI and humans together to transcribe calls. AI gets most of the stuff down, humans with their intuition can fill in the gaps or identify near-misses, and machine and human together produce a better artifact than either could alone.

Free or nearly-free transcription is everywhere today, transcribing Zoom calls and any audio uploaded into Slack. You never would have transcribed every call, when you had to hire people to type out your words, yet now that it's nearly free you might as well—and reap the benefits of never forgetting what was said in a meeting again. Human transcription is more accurate than ever, right at the time when high-quality captions are a must-have for professional video.

AI came in, disrupted and broadened the market, improved the quality of human-driven work, and made yesterday's quality bar seem impossibly low. It's hard to not imagine that happening to category after category going forward.

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