Descript offers both automatic – AI-powered – and White Glove – human-powered – transcription.
Automatic transcription accuracy varies greatly depending on the nature of the audio. With a high-quality recording, and a person speaking clearly, accuracy can get up to 95% — but poor audio quality and hard-to-distinguish speech can reduce accuracy to 80% or lower.
Transcribing files
There are a few locations in the app you can automatically transcribe a file:
- Live transcription is available when recording in the main editor or using the Quick recorder.
- You can transcribe files by adding them to your script; drag and drop the file on your script or select + to the left of the script and choose File.
- If you have imported a file directly into your Media Library, you can transcribe a file by selecting
to the right of the file’s name, and choosing transcribe file.
- You can transcribe files when creating a sequence or adding files to a sequence from the sequence editor.
Descript’s automatic transcription engine
Like most other automatic transcription services, Descript uses a third-party transcription engine for automatic transcriptions. These companies can provide much more accurate transcriptions than anything built independently. But don’t worry; we regularly measure the accuracy of all the primary transcription services to be sure we're always providing the highest quality to our customers. We sometimes publish the results of these tests - you can read more about these findings here.
How transcription time is calculated when uploading files
You have a monthly amount of transcription hours in Descript. When you upload and transcribe a file, the transcription time used is based on the entire file length, not just the parts with speech. This is important to keep in mind, especially when:
- Uploading multiple speaker files from the same interview or recording session. Each file will be deducted from your monthly transcription hours.
- You transcribe a file with large sections without speech. Again, the total length of the transcribed file will be deducted from your monthly transcription hours, not just the parts with people speaking.