I recently decided to try out MacSpeech Scribe – it’s a program that will take a recording and transcribe it for you.
It sounded pretty simple but it turns out it wasn’t the best, and here’s why:
- Only one speaker can be in the recording at a time
- You have to spend quite a bit of time at the beginning to “train” the system to recognize the speaker’s voice
- No punctuation is included in the output
- My entire computer system slows down significantly while the program is running, enough that I just have to walk away
In the end I ended up with not being able to do much on my computer while the program was running which I really didn’t like, I’m the multi-tasking queen. And, the result was one gigantic block of text with absolutely no punctuation, so I’d have to spend time going back over the whole thing with the recording so that I could add paragraph breaks and punctuation accordingly, and so I could make corrections that the system simply wasn’t able to get right.
So all in all, it actually created more work for me, and that’s definitely not what I’m aiming for!
But, luckily they offer a 30-day money back guarantee, so that was the one good point.