Those who regularly need transcription services are often looking for a probably impractical combination of high accuracy and low cost.
Scribie teases this possibility with a service that potentially offers a high degree of accuracy and is remarkably profitable.
Is Scribe too good to be true?
Packages and rates
Scribie offers two transcription options; one provided by AI and one involving people, each priced accordingly.
The automated AI service costs 10 cents per minute and, for good audio quality, promises 80% to 95% accuracy. However, it reduces this accuracy to 80% for accented speakers, to 60% for low-quality or noisy audio recordings.
The minimum bill is €1, even if your recording is less than 10 minutes and is transcribed via AI.
Recordings are processed in 30 minutes, do not include speaker tracking or time coding.
The alternative is the manual process which, unsurprisingly, takes much longer, up to 36 hours, and costs €0,80 per minute.
For eight times the cost, they predict 99% accuracy, but charge you an extra $0.50 each for strict verbatim words, upgraded speakers, noisy sound, poor sound, and subfiles: security.
And, most importantly, both services only cater to English speakers.
All treatment requires payment in advance, and this one uses a credit system that you must preload with funds in advance. A credit can be added to the account from €10 to €15,000, and multiple team members can manage a common fund.
As an interesting aside, when we first covered Scribie a few years ago, the prices were the same as they are today. So, taking into account inflation, this service becomes cheaper.
Integrated
The mechanism for downloading audio files and retrieving transcribed results is a simple web page linked to the user's account for billing.
Files can be uploaded directly from a computer or from a wide range of cloud storage providers and video sites, such as YouTube and Vimeo.
Once the files have been uploaded or transferred to Scribie, you will receive a quote for the cost of transcribing a file.
As part of our tests, we downloaded the beginning of a famous talking book by an English actor and comedian. The clip was 2 minutes and 3 seconds long, and the cost of transcribing using AI was only €1, and doing it manually was €1.64.
The AI processing was much faster than the 30 minutes allotted by the system, and once the file was processed, Scribie provided an estimated accuracy.
You can download the text in a wide range of formats, or you can use a web editor to listen to the audio along with the transcript.
This online editor is not an amazing part of Scribie. The web page it appears on does not have a horizontal scroll bar and leaves large amounts of unused white space on either side of the work area.
For manual operations, Scribie uses a four-step process to take raw recordings and transcribe them using freelancers at home to perform the transcription and proofreading stages, followed by an internal QA team to review and ensure the quality of the recording. worked.
The job support mechanisms are identical to the IA course. The only difference is that it takes more time and costs more to do it this way.
Accuracy
Evaluating the accuracy of an AI system is one thing, but a solution involving multiple humans is inherently flawed by definition. That said, Scribie has clearly built a closed-loop mechanism into its workflow to achieve the best possible accuracy within the constraints of the provided audio.
And, Scribie is confident enough in this process that, at no additional cost to the client, it will re-examine the transcript if the results are not satisfactory upon delivery.
This may not help someone working to tight deadlines, but it demonstrates a high level of commitment to getting things right in the vagaries of human communication.
If it's important to you to be super accurate, we'll use the manual service, because in our tests, AI transcription has its limitations.
One of the clearest speakers we could find was Mr. Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter, and we dropped Scribie on a little snippet of that audio. For the curious, the book in question was not written by JK Rolling', as Scribe interpreted it. But it was a slight improvement on his attempt a few years ago.
He then completely messed up the opening chapter of the book calling the Dursleys "Dales" and Dudley's "double." The last effort changed them to Danes and Mortals, though Dudley was right on one occasion.
In terms of accuracy, Scribie is improving, but it's not something we'd like to assume doesn't take a lot of work to get perfect.
Depending on the recording, regardless of its clarity, results may vary.
Earn money with Scribie
One aspect of Scribie that differs from many providers is that those who are fluent in English grammar and typing can sign up to transcribe with them and earn money.
How much money?
Pay rates range from €5 to €25 per hour of audio. And, depending on where in the world you live, the lowest wage would be considered less than minimum wage, and the highest amount would be barely a real bailout.
On the other hand, for those who stay on the service for more than a few hours, Scribie pays bonuses.
However, what is important to understand is that you cannot realistically transcribe an hour of audio into an actual hour. Transcription is done in 6-minute blocks, and Scribie's estimate is that the average speed is 45 minutes for this 6-minute section of audio.
That speed equates to 7,5 hours to complete an hour of audio, or 66 cents an hour at the lowest rate, and €3,33 for top earners. Some freelancers who work for Scribie can achieve 18 minutes per 6-minute block if they use automatic transcription and then fix the issues.
But it turns out that you perform these tasks, the job is not guaranteed, and the pay is low for a job that requires significant skills. Unless you work in a company run by criminals, jobs in English-speaking countries, even if basic, pay more than that.
Earned money is paid through PayPal, and you have to compete with others for the average of 492 new files being added to the system for transcription every day on average.
In short, unless you have endless free time and want to develop carpal tunnel problems quickly, this is not a race we recommend.
Security
Scribie uses industry standard 256-bit SSL encryption on its website, encrypting all communications between servers and browsers.
Also, all transcriptionists are bound by a confidentiality clause on what they transcribe, and since they only get 6-minute audio snippets, they never have enough content to watch everything they transcribe.
Files deleted by users are permanently deleted from the servers and the account can also be purged if deleted.
The company will also sign company-specific confidentiality agreements if required, but the service is not HIPAA compliant.
final verdict
Scribie is a service that seems cheap at first, and it is if you use only AI options. But for those who want more accurate transcriptions, the manual option may be less appealing if they have a bad recording of an Australian giving a presentation outdoors at an airport.
The American nature of this solution demonstrates that the majority of transcribers for Scribie are from North America, and as such ironically find the regional accents of English speakers from other countries, including England, a challenge.
While Scribie claims to have expertise in British, Australian, Indian, African, European, and Asian accents, there are additional costs and longer lead times for these.
Due to the additional cost and time, we suggest that the service is probably only suitable for people residing in the United States. UK residents, for example, should be able to find local transcription services that don't add extra fees for their local dialects.
For those in the US, this solution seems very affordable, especially if you have good enough records to get acceptable accuracy from your AI solution.
Those who require the highest levels of accuracy can use the manual service, which again is relatively inexpensive if you don't incur any additional expense.
There are better services out there, but not many that cheap.