AI vs. human transcription

This is Talk Type, from the team at Pepys, where we turn talk into text.

For decades, transcription meant a person. Someone sat with headphones, played the audio, typed what they heard, and rewound the parts they missed. Then AI got good enough to do the listening. So which should you use? The honest answer is, it depends on what you're transcribing and what you need from it.

Start with speed, because it's the most obvious difference. A human transcriptionist works at maybe three or four times the length of the audio. One hour of recording, three or four hours of typing. AI does the same hour in minutes. If you're on a deadline, or you have a stack of interviews, that gap is the whole ballgame.

Then accuracy, where it's less clear-cut than people assume. A skilled human is still the gold standard on hard audio. Thick accents, heavy crosstalk, specialized jargon, bad recordings. A person can use context and a quick search to get a name right. AI on clean audio is genuinely excellent now, often as good as a human for practical purposes. But on messy audio it makes confident mistakes, and it won't tell you it's unsure.

Cost follows from the labor. Human transcription is priced per minute of audio and it adds up fast, because someone is spending real hours on it. AI is a fraction of that, because the machine isn't billing by the hour.

So here's the practical way to think about it. If you have one short, high-stakes recording where every word has to be perfect, a legal deposition, say, a human is worth it. For almost everything else, the smart move is a hybrid. Let AI do the first pass in minutes, then a person, often you, spends a few minutes fixing the handful of names and terms it got wrong. You get most of the accuracy of a human transcriptionist, at a fraction of the time and cost. That's the workflow most people land on once they've tried both.

That's this episode of Talk Type. The full write up, with the links and sources, is in the show notes. Pepys transcribes any file or link, any length, pay once, and we never train on your audio. Your first sixty minutes are free at pepys dot co. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.