We found that the most commonly recommended AI services cost around 25¢ per minute of audio, and services employing human transcriptionists cost up to $2 for a minute of clear audio. Cost: Whether your employer or client pays for your transcriptions or it comes out of your pocket, it’s important that they be cost-effective.Many AI-based services don’t report accuracy, but one option we tested claimed to be at least 90% accurate for clear audio.

Among human-backed transcription services, we favored those that claimed to be at least 99% accurate. We also researched services’ self-reported accuracy and other people’s experience with them.

Readability: The single most important factor in choosing a transcription service is the readability of the resulting transcript, so we checked samples for grammar and spelling.

Because Temi is quick and relatively inexpensive (at 25¢ per minute of audio), it’s a great choice for anyone who is paying for their own transcriptions, doesn’t expect them to be error-free, and doesn’t mind doing some cleanup work themselves. (We recommend using a company that employs human transcriptionists if your recordings have noise, feature a non-American accent, include speech impediments, or otherwise pose a challenge.) Transcripts arrive in minutes, and the built-in text editor lets you easily clean up the completed transcript-a necessity since even the top AI-based services, like Temi, get only about 75% of words right at best. In our tests, Temi transcripts were the easiest to read among the AI-based options, with acceptable grammar and word accuracy even when our audio contained jargon or background noise.

They do not return results that are perfect enough that you can expect to copy a quote without going back and checking the actual content of the audio. AI-based transcription services are useful for finding a specific place in or quickly skimming the contents of an audio recording.

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