Case study: Using speech-to-text transcription

The mission of Nichepublisher.biz is to provide indispensable business intelligence to publishing companies. Like other small media companies, we always need to cuts steps out of the workflow. Note: Please access a copy of the exact prompt in the Media Prompt Library here. 

Challenge

NPB wanted to eliminate time spent listening to interviews and webinars multiple times to ensure accuracy and knew that AI-empowered speech-to-text technology was the way to go.

“We just needed the right speech-to-text platform to transcribe interviews, webinars, and videos.  Not everyone often has 20 minutes to listen to a webinar, so these speech-to-text summaries now only save time for reporters and allow us to post text summaries of videos and webinars.

“We also regularly brainstorm with smart people in the industry and meet with partners, and we wanted to highlight the takeaways from these meetings. In short, we wanted a platform to support both meetings and journalism.”

Strategy

With so many available tools, the first step was to define the criteria:

• Transcription of a pre-recorded webinar without downloading and uploading
• Transcription of  two-person interviews in real-time with the voices separate
• Meeting summaries that could be easily shared
• Integration with Google Calendar, MicroSoft Teams,  Zoom,  and WordPress

• Super easy-to-use
• Fewest steps to get to an end product
• Reasonable price, which we set at <$250 a year
• Results that are accurate and glitch-free

The software tested included Notta.ai, SpeechTexter, Google Dictate, and Otter.AI.

Software testers opened a video and played it while the speech-to-text recording and a real-time, live two-person call were turned on.

Conclusions

Nichepublisher.Biz adopted Otter.AI as the go-to platform for both calls and transcriptions of audio/video events. The team is now working on integrations that pull this content into WordPress, but these transcripts have already cut hours out of the workday.

The integrations needed are there, and it also integrates with  Slack, DropBox, and Hubspot  (although, unfortunately, not WordPress).

The user interface is super simple, and more steps are cut by extra functionsality, such as creating a summary, editing in-app, copying and sharing buttons, and recording meetings on your schedule even if you cannot attend.

Voice identification is excellent but not perfect.  OtterPilot allows meeting attendees to find every mention of their name, but does not always separate voices.

It was also the only platform to precisely transcribe a pre-recorded webinar or video without uploading a file (although you can if you want to).  This was surprisingly difficult to get Google or NOTTA to do (note: Notta.ai is not the same as heynota.com, another AI-based software we’ll check out down the line as an easier way to produce a newsletter).

The price is reasonable; a Basic Plan is free and provides 300 minutes of transcription per month, with a limit of 30 minutes per conversation.

The next level, $16.99 per month, provides  1,200 minutes of transcription per month with a limit of 90 minutes per conversation, plus an import and transcription of ten audio or video files per month.

The Business Plan was too high and unneeded.  At $40 per month, this level accepts multiple users and 6,000 total minutes of transcription per month, with a limit of 4 hours per conversation.

Google Docs, which offers free transcription, did not make the cut because the recorder quit every five seconds.

Results and lessons learned

• NPB now uses Otter.ai on almost every interview and call.
• For Q&As, they select “transcription,” lightly edit it, and paste it into WordPress.
• For articles from an interview, they paste the Q&A into ChatGPT with prompts included in the Media Prompt Library.  
• Editing is still required!
• Any video or webinar is now automatically fed into Otter for easier editing.
• While still looking for a fully automated solution that posts the content directly into WP, the time savings are now critical to the business model.
• Meeting notes have also improved in mission-critical ways.