I’ve been on the hunt for a transcription service. Every mindful of data security and how AI seems to be everywhere, and asking for another subscription, I had several requirements.

1. Not cost a huge amount for the service.
2. Accuracy vs cost – don’t waana be cheap and then spend hours editing (or waiting).
3. Data security – how will the service manage my data?
4. Can I opt out of the general pool of data training AI models?

So, I went searching, and found something which I think may be useful whatever your business and best of all IT’S FREE! And better than that, NO UPLOADS REQUIRED!

Wait? What?

I have written full instructions in a blog, and I think anyone who can install a program can set this up. You need two downloads, both free: Audacity and Intel’s Open VINO WHisper transcriber, which is a module within Audacity. From my research it seems to install all the files you need onto your PC, and runs the transcription using Intel’s OpenVINO Toolkit to run AI models locally on your computer.

It’s a lot simpler than that sounds, you install Audacity, and the OpenVINO module and enable it in the program and away you go. No email sign up, no credit card no mailing newsletter to join.

All the details are on the blog here: https://businessoddcast.com/free-audio-to-text-transcription-guide-using-audacity/

The file it spits out requires some editing, but it’s a great place to start and we’re finding that it churns through a 60 min Podcast audio in about 10 mins (varies depending on device computing power). Then it takes about an hour to clean up the text, and that gives us a 12-16 page document.

We have now indexed our entire catalogue of podcasts, which makes them searchable. Plus we have added the transcription to the episode page (great for SEO) as well as making it very quick to create social posts, blogs and other text based content.

Useful?