Otter.ai is a fantastic free tool that will take away your transcription headaches for you in minutes.
As communications specialists, writers and journalists, transcribing interviews for clients, or minutes of meetings are a time consuming, mind numbing task.
I write for Triple Pundit, and most of the work I do is based on interviews that I feature in my articles. Interviews often last 30-45 minutes. For my newsletter, the interviews are often an hour long. After that, transcription would take at least another hour or two – if I do it in one stretch, which is not easy because it is so boring.
When I discovered Otter, I found that I could just upload my video or audio file, for free, and it would give me a transcription of it in seconds. Now what’s even better is that I can scroll over the transcription and listen to the bits that I want to, or that have not been transcribed 100% correctly. I can highlight bits of the transcription and even edit it.
You can even record the interview or meeting within Otter and it will transcribe it directly. You can also paste the URL of the meeting or interview into Otter, and it will do the job too. It integrates seamlessly with Zoom, Google Meet, and Dropbox.
What’s more, you can even get Otter to transcribe Youtube videos you don’t have time to watch but could probably find time to skim through the transcription!
Of course, the free version is limited to 3 transcriptions no longer than 30 minutes long, but that’s enough to give it a shot. Also, it only supports English for the moment, but it does recognize many accents of non-English speakers speaking English.
I don’t know about you, but I’m loving these tools that are saving me so much time and energy!