How long it takes to transcribe audio
The sum almost nobody does before agreeing to transcribe a two-hour meeting.
The rule of thumb across the industry is that transcribing by hand costs between four and eight times the length of the audio. An hour of clean recording with a single speaker runs to about four hours of work; a round table with background noise, different accents and people talking over each other gets close to eight.
The difference is not typing speed, it is the stopping: rewinding the three seconds you did not catch, working out who is speaking, resolving a technical term, cleaning up the filler words. That is what multiplies the time, and it is also why the optimistic estimate always misses.
This calculator gives you the realistic range for the difficulty of your audio, and compares it against transcribing automatically, where the work shrinks to reviewing and correcting instead of writing from scratch.
How to use it
- 01 Enter how long the recording runs, in minutes.
- 02 Pick the difficulty: how many speakers, whether the audio is clean, whether they overlap.
- 03 Compare doing it by hand against reviewing an automatic transcript.
Frequently asked questions
Where do those ratios come from?
They are the ones transcription agencies quote with: 4:1 for clean single-speaker audio, around 6:1 for normal multi-speaker audio and 8:1 or worse for difficult recordings.
Does automatic transcription remove the work?
No, it moves it. You still have to go over proper nouns, technical terms and punctuation, but reviewing and correcting is far faster than writing from scratch.
How much does audio quality matter?
Enormously, more than any other variable. A decent microphone close to whoever is speaking can halve transcription time, by hand and automatically alike.
What if it also needs translating?
Add roughly as much again: translating a transcript costs about what reviewing it does. Eco does both at once, while the audio plays.
Related tools
This is what Eco does live.
These utilities work on files you already have. Eco transcribes and translates while the audio is still playing: meetings, classes, videos in another language.
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