With audio transcription, you get what you pay for.

For a dollar per minute of audio,Revwill give you a well-formatted transcript.

And for 10 cents a minute, the brand-newCheapTranscription.iowill give you a no-frills text doc with even more errors.

Depending on your needs, you might want to use all three.

Heres how to choose.

Or say you need captions for a video.

Or say youve interviewed someone and want to print the entire interview.

If you’ve got the option to afford it, Rev is the best solution.

Price: High

Rev charges $1/minute for transcripts and for video captions in English.

Video captions include timestamps.

Ive also used Rev to make high-quality captions for my personal creative video projects.

Theres no minimum fee, so Ive even run three-minute YouTube videos through Rev.

These are flat rates, with no extra charge for more speakers.

you might pay extra for things like including every verbal tic, or for including timestamps on a transcript.

Rev also offers translations for 10 cents/word on written documents, $3-7/minute on audio and video recordings.

Any unintelligible words will be marked.

These are usually minimal, maybe two to five in an hour-long phone call.

Youll save yourself a lot of grunt work.

No transcription service is always perfect.

Update: 3/27/2019, 9:30 a.m.

ET:Rev recently made a major update to its transcript editor.

The new editor makes Rev a much better option than before.

Its an embarrassing oversight from an otherwise top-shelf service.

Our favorite, and the one we use at Lifehacker, isTrint.

And because its automated, the turnaround time for a transcription is usually under an hour.

At 10+ hours per month, you pay just 20 cents per minute.

A subscription includes use of Trints excellent transcript editor, which is the real killer product.

Trints automated transcripts arent nearly as accurate as anything human-made.

They trip up easily on phone calls.

Heres that same Cecil Baldwin excerpt, transcribed by Trint:

One annoyance is that Trintdoescatch every verbal tic.

Ive had to delete annoying filler words in every sentence he spoke.

Barely noticeable in speech, highly noticeable in transcripts.

Trints editor is the services real advantage.

Put your cursor anywhere in the transcript, and you could start playing audio from that exact point.

This allows for quick precise editing, and helps you interpret the many baffling mis-transcriptions that Trint will make.

And if you’ve got the option to use an organizational budget, its absolutely worth it.

Thats why Lifehackers publisher, Gizmodo Media Group, bought a blanket Trint subscription for its reporters.

Maybe you just want your podcast episode to show up in relevant Google searches.

Right now theres no export feature, so youll have to copy-paste your transcript into a text editor.

And there are no timestamps.

Speakers are separated, but given generic names.

Like Trint, it includes every verbal tic, which makes reading a transcription very annoying.

Your transcript is just text on a static web page.

Edit in Word or Google Docs or whatever you usually write in.

And thats the real problem: Trint helps you correct its work.

If you want to edit a CheapTranscription transcript, youll still want to usea specialized transcription editor like oTranscribeorOtter.

Youll still get better results than the free option:running your audio through YouTubeand grabbing the transcript.

At that point, youre getting near gibberish.

Theyve already announced plans to add human transcribers.

Also expect an increase in transcription quality as they train their algorithms.

Of course, this doesnt mean theyll ever catch up to Trint or other algorithmic services.

So you’re free to put in orders at all three services as you need.

Most of the time, Trint is plenty for my purposes.

The human transcription costs four times as much, but its incredibly accurate.

Getting perfect transcripts saved us hours of work on a high-profile piece.