TranscribeMe Review

TranscribeMe is a good choice for users who want a low-cost transcription service with no commitment. Its machine transcription is particularly good.

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TranscribeMe Specs

In a sea of web-based transcription services, it can be hard to stand out. TranscribeMe is a solid, middle-of-the-road transcription service that does what it advertises—transcribes audio and video files—with few frills and errors. While nothing about the service makes it stand out, TranscribeMe offers low-cost automated transcription, online editing software that works fairly smoothly, and a quality mobile app. If all you need is an audio file turned into text at a low cost, TranscribeMe gets the job done.

How Much Does TranscribeMe Cost?

TranscribeMe is among the least expensive transcription services on the market. Automated transcription via the website costs 7 cents per audio minute—the lowest rate we’ve seen. Automated transcription through the app costs 10 cents per minute, however.

For human-generated transcriptions, which are always more accurate than AI transcriptions, TranscribeMe has tiered pricing. It starts at 79 cents per minute for a first draft, $1.25 per minute for standard transcriptions with reportedly 99% accuracy, and $2 per minute for verbatim transcriptions.

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Compared with other services, TranscribeMe has just about the lowest price around. Scribie is comparable, with automated transcriptions costing 10 cents per minute and human transcriptions beginning at 80 cents per minute. Editors’ Choice GoTranscript offers only human transcription (no AI options) for as low as 77 cents per minute, but that price comes only with large volume orders; the basic rate is 90 cents per audio minute.

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While TranscribeMe has very low rates, it doesn’t give away any services for free. For that, turn to Temi, which transcribes your first recording of up to 45 minutes for free. You don’t even need to enter a credit card to get started. Another service that has a generous free trial is Rev, our Editors’ Choice winner for best overall. Rev offers a free trial membership to its subscription service for 14 days. It requires a credit card, however, which is charged on day 15 if you don’t cancel first.

System Requirements and Privacy

TranscribeMe is web-based, just like the other services we reviewed. It runs best on the latest versions of Chrome and Safari. TranscribeMe is also available as a mobile app for Android and iPhone.

TranscribeMe has reasonably transparent privacy policies. For human-generated transcriptions, the company breaks the project into segments so that no one transcriber receives an entire file. All employees sign nondisclosure agreements and can sign yours as well upon request. TranscribeMe uses Amazon Web Services for its platform, which is highly rated for security. The company said via email that its software is HIPAA-compliant and that files are deleted from the employee side after 30 days and from the user portal after one year of inactivity.

Should TranscribeMe receive a subpoena, its legal counsel reviews the request, notifies the customer of the request, and complies with all applicable laws.

Getting Started

To begin using TranscribeMe, you need to create an account. It only takes a moment. Be careful with your password, since it won’t ask you to enter it twice when setting up a new account. Once you’ve made an account, it’s simple to upload your audio file and choose which transcription service best fits your project. As mentioned in the pricing section, TranscribeMe offers four different transcription services: a machine-generated transcription and three levels of human transcription.

The most basic human transcription takes about a day to process and is reportedly at least 98% accurate. One tier up, standard transcription, promises to be 99% accurate and takes between one and three days to process. GoTranscript’s verbatim transcription “captures every utterance,” meaning all the extraneous ums and hmms.

Editing and Using Transcriptions

Once transcription documents are completed, users receive an email alert from TranscribeMe.

Editing with TranscribeMe is uncomplicated and functional. The web-based editing software is straightforward to use and has a few more frills than other services. For example, a hotkey shortcut guide is useful for quick editing, once you get the hang of it. Autosave is a relief to have, and something GoTranscript lacks. You also get the ability to export transcription documents to DOC, TXT, or subtitle files.

One option that TranscribeMe offers that’s a huge service to users is the ability to upgrade a transcription that was already completed. For example, if you order a quick machine transcription at the bargain rate of 7 cents per minute and then decide the content requires a verbatim transcription, you can upgrade the work right in the user dashboard and only pay the difference in the two fees.

The mobile app is also useful for ordering transcripts directly from your phone. While you can’t edit the transcripts directly in the app, you can export the text to any software you choose by copying and pasting, link sharing, or saving directly to Dropbox.

Accuracy of Transcriptions

To test and compare transcription services, I recorded myself reading the introduction to Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. I uploaded the same file to all the transcription services I tested. Then I compared the errors each one made.

TranscribeMe’s human-generated transcripts are as accurate as those from any other service we looked at. When put up against Rev, our Editors’ Choice winner, TranscribeMe’s manual transcription was essentially identical. Humans are pretty great at transcribing accurately, it seems.

As to the machine-generated transcription from TranscribeMe, it came out with excellent accuracy. Capitalization, punctuation, and sentence breaks were fairly accurate. One word that stumped almost all the services we reviewed was crawdad. Scribie thought the word was cards. Temi’s guess was cry dads. TranscribeMe got it right, which was impressive.

A Variety of Other Services

While TranscribeMe offers high-quality and straightforward transcription services, the company also has several other specialized services, which have separate costs (Opens in a new window) that aren’t advertised; you have to contact the company for a quote. For example, you can purchase transcription services for audio recordings with legal and medical terminology and get a transcriptionist with knowledge of that industry’s jargon. We looked at a few other services that offer this same kind of specialization, including Rev and GoTranscript, though we didn’t test this part of the service for any of them.

TranscribeMe also offers translation for a variety of languages, though audio files need to first be transcribed into the written word before they’re translated. The languages that TranscribeMe can work with are Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

One unique feature TranscribeMe has that its competitors do not is data annotation (Opens in a new window) , which is for organizations that feed transcriptions into machine-learning or AI models. The process of identifying relationships, semantics, and emotions within transcriptions is useful in many industries, such as chatbots that deal in customer service. These more technical uses set TranscribeMe apart from some of its competitors. I did not test this side of TranscribeMe.

Who Should Use TranscribeMe?

Given the number of transcription services available, choosing one or another can be hard. TranscribeMe is best when you need a fast and accurate machine-generated transcription at a low cost. It’s also a solid choice for customers who need more in-depth data manipulation such as data annotation or specific transcription for machine learning or translation services. Our Editors’ Choice for best overall transcription service, however, remains Rev, which has a mobile app for recording phone calls and other options that add to its appeal. And GoTranscript is our Editors’ Choice for human-generated transcriptions. If those options sound like more than what you need, TranscribeMe is a great choice.

Got an iPhone 14? Here’s How to Enable the Startup Sound

The iPhone doesn’t technically have a startup chime like macOS, but accessibility settings in the iPhone 14 can tell your phone to make a sound when you turn it on or off.

iPhone 14 Pro Max (Credit: Eric Zeman)

Apple users loved the startup chime that sounded off anytime a Mac was turned on. The sound mysteriously disappeared when Apple redesigned the MacBook in 2016, but it returned with the macOS 11 (Big Sur) (Opens in a new window) operating system.

There was never an official startup chime for the iPhone, and there still isn’t, but you can add one if you own an iPhone 14. Using accessibility settings, you can enable a different type of startup sound that gives Apple users a similar satisfaction when their devices are turned on.

What Does the Startup Sound Do?

The iPhone 14 startup sound is different from the familiar Mac startup chime (Opens in a new window) . A Mac’s startup chime is used to indicate that certain diagnostic tests have run successfully and no errors were found. As explained by Steven Acquino on Twitter (Opens in a new window) , the startup sound found on any iPhone 14 model is actually an accessibility feature that helps those with visual impairments know when they have successfully powered their device on and off.

How to Enable iPhone Startup Sound

Even though the iPhone 14 startup chime isn’t specifically designed as comfort food for Apple enthusiasts, anyone can enable it by opening Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual, then toggling Power on & Off Sounds to on.

In order to hear the sound in action, you will need to power down your iPhone 14 by pressing both the Volume Up and Sleep/Wake button until the Slide to Power Off option appears.

Once you do that, a different sound than the traditional Mac boot chime will sound shortly before your iPhone 14 shuts off completely. The next time you hear the sound is after you press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until you see the Apple logo.

What iPhone Models Can Use the Startup Sound?

The startup chime is only available on the iPhone 14, 14 Plus, 14 Pro, and 14 Pro Max. This is because the Power on & Off Sounds accessibility https://jiji.ng/ setting is built into the A16 Bionic chip firmware and not the operating system and allows the chime to play even before the OS loads.