This portion of the LibGuide is intended as a resource to assist with audio transcriptions. It includes links, descriptions, and ratings of various third-party programs that use artificial intelligence (AI) to generate transcripts, and how you can use these transcripts either for the audio itself or in conjunction with the creation of video captions. Some of these services also offer human transcription, at a higher cost.
There are a variety of uses for transcribing audio in this way:
- Creating written transcripts of fieldwork interviews or other kind of research audio
- Creating transcripts of podcasts or other audio content for hearing-impaired audiences
- Creating subtitles for a video (especially using the options within Canvas and YouTube)
- Creation transcripts of class lecture audio (for students with an accommodation via Services for Students with Disabilities)
General Things to Keep in Mind
- Requires Clear Audio - Voices should be recorded close to the microphone so they are heard clearly.
- Accuracy - Because this is a machine transcription, it will always miss some words including slang, punctuation, homophones (write/right), and proper nouns.
- Proofreading - Using any of these platforms will require more editing than a human transcription. Balance out the amount of time this will take vs. transcribing it yourself (or paying someone to do so).
- Accents - While many of these platforms support multiple languages, they are less reliable with accented variants within a given language.
- Privacy - If the audio files are not meant to be shared (if you have an IRB and/or are working with sensitive interview data), you should not use these platforms. The majority of these platforms will send your audio to a server (somewhere) and the control you have to remove audio from those servers varies with each platform.