What Are Some Valuable Transcription Resources Available for Journalists?

This piece goes out to all the people who are really tired of asking “what?” in conversation for the umpteenth time, only to give up and nod and smile at the person (and hope it wasn’t a question).  A journalist’s best tools are their five senses (taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight) but some of us don’t have exactly adequate control over all five. Luckily, technology is changing to catch up to that. 

Automated transcription, where your phone listens to an audio recording and writes it down for you, is becoming more and more available as our technology gets more and more advanced.  Some of these apps were even made with journalists or other jobs where conducting interviews might be necessary in mind.

Cogi

From the website: “Cogi keeps the last few moments of audio buffered. When someone says something interesting, just tap the highlight button and Cogi backs up to capture and save what was just said. When the moment has passed, just tap again and Cogi will stop highlighting. You can have as many highlights in a session as you like.” Therefore, Cogi makes it easier to record the highlights of the meeting rather than having to sift through half an hour of audio to find one or two answers. Cogi starts at a $15/month subscription for 50 GB of storage and access to Cogi Scribe, which writes down the pieces you’ve saved at $1.50/minute of audio.

Trint

Trint is an automated transcription service used by the likes of the Associated Press and The Washington Post. Trint uses automated speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP) to break down the phonetics of each word and then matches those words to corresponding ones in its internal dictionary. It offers both audio and text file outputs in a variety of formats, making the data very easy to share with others. Trint also contains a vocabulary builder so that any unique phrasing doesn’t go undetected. Trint also lets you auditorily search your file, so that, like Cogi, you don’t need to sift through hours of audio.  The most popular Trint plan runs $60/month for a no-commitment usage of the product.

Transcribe

Simple name, yet effective. Transcribe is available in the Mac App Store and has a wide variety of uses for its simple function. From Apple: “Do you have to listen to your voice memos over and over again to remember what you said? Do you spend a long time writing meeting minutes or reviewing interviews you've recorded? Maybe you're the type of person who prefers to read notes, rather than sit through hours of online courses and lectures? What if you need to create subtitles for a movie or want to quickly translate a foreign language video? Transcribe does all this and more – converting speech from multiple sources into plain, readable text ready to read, translate and share with others.” The app depends heavily on the quality of the recording, so this is best used on raw voice files recorded from your own phone or else the quality of an already finished product.

Temi

Temi is a free app that allows you to get real-time voice-to-text transcriptions while you are recording. Whereas most other apps use a third party to listen to the interview and transcribe it for you, and have it back to you within 24-48 hours, Temi converts the audio to text as it receives the audio and enables you to e-mail the transcription to yourself immediately. Since this is an AI system it’s not always word perfect, but reviews say the transcriptions tend to be accurate more often than not.

Imagine what things would have been possible if society had transcription before the 21st century; we might know how Ancient Greeks created Greek fire. We might know if there actually was a city of Atlantis or a Trojan War and, if so, if any of the things Plato or Homer said about them are true. It boggles the mind, doesn’t it?

With such an important first-hand resource at our disposal in the 21st century, we must learn to use it and use it often. The information we save for future generations could be invaluable.