9 Best Automatic Transcription Tools in 2024

Your organization needs tools that help everyone communicate efficiently, make data-driven decisions with confidence, and elevate productivity. That’s where automatic transcription tools come in. These tools leverage artificial intelligence to transcribe meetings, conferences, and audio content. Discover the top 9 automatic transcription tools to boost efficiency and enhance workflows in 2024.

• What are automated transcription tools?
• Manual vs. automatic transcription
• 9 best automatic transcription tools
• Save time and money with an automatic transcription tool

What are automated transcription tools? 

Automated transcription tools are speech-to-text tools that leverage algorithms and software to listen to audio and transform it into transcriptions. Often powered by AI, automated transcriptions help save time, money, and resources compared to manual transcriptions. This technology works by analyzing audio input, identifying individual words, and generating a written transcript, and can be used in many scenarios including meetings, presentations, interviews, and keynote speeches. 

Manual vs. automatic transcription

Manual transcription

Pros:

• Maintains more context or nuances, e.g. verbal cues, tone
• Captures different speaking styles and accents better
• May offer more security in terms of data safety

Cons:

• Takes more time and manual effort to transcribe
• Costs more than automatic tools
• Leaves more room for human error

Automatic transcription

Pros:

• Transcribes at a faster processing speed
• Costs less than manual transcription services
• Offers efficient editing, collaborating, and sharing capabilities
• Provides greater accessibility
• Can integrate with other tools

Cons:

• Does not pick up all verbal cues or nuances
• May vary in accuracy depending on the software

9 best automatic transcription tools

• Fellow
• Trint
• Fathom
• Sonix
• Vocalmatic
• Descript
• Audext
• Happy Scribe
• Riverside.fm

1 Fellow: Best for automating your organization’s meeting transcriptions

Fellow is the only all-in-one AI meeting transcription and management software for remote and hybrid teams. Fellow’s AI Meeting Copilot automatically records, transcribes, and summarizes your meetings in up to 10 languages. With 50+ native integrations, Fellow seamlessly integrates into your organization’s meeting workflow.

Within minutes of the meeting ending, Fellow generates a searchable, downloadable, and shareable transcript, providing everyone with an accurate record of the discussion. Meeting participants can also link to specific parts of the meeting to provide stakeholders context and important details without navigating through the entire transcript or video recording.

In addition to the transcript, Fellow generates a comprehensive meeting summary that includes key meeting takeaways, organized meeting sections, and action items based on the conversation. These meeting recordings, transcriptions, and summaries are also linked to your meeting notes and calendar events so stakeholders can access them later without missing context, decisions, or next steps.

Unlike other automated transcription tools, Fellow centralizes the entire meeting workflow from start to finish. Rated the top meeting management software by G2, Fellow empowers team members to execute efficient and effective meetings with collaborative meeting agendas and their library of 500+ free meeting agenda templates. Fellow also enables team members to assign and track action items, automate any follow-ups, or get insight into meeting habits across teams and organizations.

Pricing:

• Limited free plan available
• Paid plans start at $7 per user per month
• Learn more about Fellow’s plans

G2 Rating: 4.7/5 with 2,063 reviews

2 Trint: Best for turning video and audio files into text

Trint is AI-powered audio transcription software that quickly converts audio and video files to text. Users can either capture audio live or upload audio or video files to be transcribed or made into closed captions in over 40 languages. You can also edit or playback the transcripts and use Trint’s editing tools to create or collaborate on content creation, e.g., soundbites, podcasts, articles, etc.

Pricing:

• No free plan available
• Paid plans start at $80 per user/month

G2 Rating: 4.4/5 with 65 reviews

3 Fathom: Best free option

Fathom is an AI notetaking tool that summarizes and transcribes your meetings in Teams, Google Meet, and Zoom. With Fathom, you can highlight parts of the conversation or copy and paste your perfectly formatted summaries and action items into Google Docs or your favorite project management tool for easy access. Fathom is a great option for organizations with limited budgets, as it offers unlimited free transcription, recording and summarization.

Pricing:

• Free plan with most features available
• Paid plans available at $19/month

G2 Rating: 5/5 with 2,279 reviews

4 Sonix: Best for automated subtitling

Sonix is an audio and video transcription service leveraging industry-leading speech-to-text algorithms to transcribe audio and video files and translate them into 40+ languages. Sonix’s in-browser editor allows you to search, play, edit, organize, and share your transcripts from anywhere on any device, making sharing your transcriptions during meetings, lectures, or interviews a breeze. Sonix also integrates with tools like Salesforce, Evernote, and Adobe Premiere to connect everything in your workflow.

Pricing:

• Free plan available
• Paid plans start at $22 per user/month

G2 Rating: 4.7/5 with 22 reviews

5 Vocalmatic: Best simple interface

Vocalmatic is an automatic transcription tool that analyzes an audio recording second by second, determining what word is said at each second and saving each word into a transcript. As soon as your transcript is complete, Vocalmatic will email you a link to it, which you can then share or edit to your liking. 

Pricing:

• No free plan available
• Paid plans start at $15/month

G2 Rating: 4.5/5 with 5 reviews

6 Descript: Best for content creation

Descript is an editing and transcription tool that allows users to write, record, transcribe, edit, collaborate on, and share videos and podcasts seamlessly within one platform. Their accurate and rapid automatic transcription features support audio in 22 languages. 

Pricing:

• Free plan available
• Paid plans start at $12 per user/month

G2 Rating: 4.6/5 with 447 reviews

7 Audext: Best web-based option

Audext is a smart service for transcribing speech to text online that doesn’t require downloads or external software. This automatic transcription tool can convert audio files and receive an hour of audio file transcription in 10 minutes and in 60+ languages using speech recognition. The web-based interface is simple—users can open their browser, transcribe speech to text, edit the transcript, and save it in DOCX or TXT format.

Pricing:

• Free trial with 10 minutes of transcription available
• Paid plans start at $5 per hour

G2 Rating: 4.8/5 with 2 reviews

8 Happy Scribe: Best for multiple languages and formats

Happy Scribe offers both automatic and human transcription services. It allows users to convert audio to text with 85-99% accuracy in over 120 languages and more than 45 formats. Happy Scribe offers intuitive features such as unlimited uploads, collaborative workspaces, interactive editing, application programming interfaces (APIs) and integrations, and machine translations.

Pricing:

• Free plan available
• Paid plans start at $10/month

G2 Rating: 4.8/5 with 21 reviews

10Riverside.fm: Best for podcasts

Riverside.fm is a podcasting and remote recording platform designed to help podcasters and creators record quality content with remote participants. In addition to this functionality, Riverside.fm can also be used as a transcription tool to convert audio or video into text files in minutes. This tool supports over 100 different languages and various file formats, making it suitable for a variety of transcription projects. 

Pricing:

• Free plan available
• Paid plans start at $15/month

G2 Rating: 4.8/5 with 717 reviews

Save time and money with an automatic transcription tool

Leveraging an automatic transcription tool is an excellent way to save time and cut costs. Since you’re investing your organization’s time and money into the tool, look for a tool that offers automatic transcription and solves other problems like automatic meeting notes or meeting management. All-in-one AI meeting transcription and management software like Fellow enables executives to automate all their meeting transcriptions and focus on work. Get started with Fellow today!