Transcription services can be an invaluable resource for anyone who spends time working with interviews or recordings.
Transcription Panda offers an accurate human-powered transcription at a fair price.
However, it's missing standard features such as a web editor and mobile apps.
For a transcription service that provides a more complete set of features at a reasonable price, we recommend Editors' Choice Rev.
Pricing Tiers
Transcription Panda's Standard Transcription service, which returns jobs in 2-3 business days and costs $1.20 per minute, is reasonable.
However, the verbatim and timestamps options each cost an additional $0.25 per minute.
As opposed to the regular transcription service, transcripts with the verbatim option include all audible content, such as filler words and laughter.
Difficult audio files with lots of background noise, heavy accents, or more than five speakers that need to be individually identified incur an additional $0.50 cost per minute of audio.
Changing the delivery speed to a 24-hour window doubles the base cost to $2.40 per minute.
If the transcription is not a priority, you can select a 7-10 day turnaround time at a starting price of $0.79 per minute.
Transcription Panda also offers a Quick Draft transcription service for $0.79 per minute with a turnaround time of 24 hours.
Compared to the Standard service, Quick Draft has a slightly lower accuracy guarantee (90-95 percent vs.
99+ percent) and does not give users the option to select the verbatim or timestamp options for their order.
By comparison, Rev ( at Rev) only charges $1 per minute of audio and $0.25 per minute for timestamps.
Rev also returns files under 30 minutes in length within 12 hours.
GoTranscript costs a bit less too, charging $1.65 per minute of audio for files with a one-day turnaround time, three or more speakers, and timestamps on speaker change.
On the other hand, Scribie and TranscribeMe are consistent with Transcription Panda's costs given similar delivery times and options.
Transcription Process
Automatic transcription services are inherently safer than human-powered ones, since you are the only human with access to your files with those services.
That said, Transcription Panda's transcriptionists are all under strict non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).
You can also submit a custom NDA to Transcription Panda, if necessary.
For reference, Panda Transcript does not support two-factor authentication, though no transcription service we tested does.
You also can't delete files or your account on your own and instead need to submit a request to do so.
Every service should support two-factor authentication, especially those that host potentially sensitive information, and the lack of deletion options disappoints me.
For most jobs, transcripts pass through a two-step process.
To start, a single transcriptionist completes the first pass on your transcription.
For longer files, Transcription Panda will split the job into several parts to accelerate the return time.
A transcription manager performs a final review and makes any subsequent edits.
My contact at Transcription Panda emphasized the company's flexibility in terms of creating custom workflows and support solutions for clients, such as by setting them up with dedicated transcription managers.
Transcription Panda states that it has transcriptionists trained in the legal and medical fields, though it encourages you to contact them to verify any such jobs before submitting them.
Note that Transcription Panda is not HIPPA-compliant.
TranscribeMe is fully compliant with HIPPA.
Sign Up and Order
Anyone can sign up for an account with Transcription Panda.
All you need to provide is a first and last name, your email address, and a password.
You don't need to add a payment method up front, which I appreciate, but Transcription Panda does not offer any sort of free trial.
While a few automatic transcriptions services offer free account tiers, none of the human-based services that I have reviewed let users test the service for free.
If you want to get a feel for how Transcription Panda works, consider submitting a short snippet of your audio file.
Transcription Panda features a cost estimator tool on its website, so you can figure out exactly how much a transcription job will cost before committing.
If you aren't happy with the final results, Transcription Panda offers a liberal 14-day satisfaction guarantee.
Placing an order is simple.
You can either upload a file from your computer or upload a link.
Oddly, you need to enter the total number of minutes you intend to transcribe manually; most services detect this automatically when you add a file.
After that, you select either the Quick Draft or Standard option as well as a turnaround time.
The verbatim, timestamp, difficult, audio and translation (via Transcription Panda's sister site, Translation Panda) appear in the additional options section.
Make sure you deselect every option you don't want since it can be visually unclear at a quick glance what options you have enabled for a given order.
As you make your selections, Transcription Panda updates the cost-per-minute metric at the bottom of the form and calculates a running total.
You can also add notes about speaker names in the file, uncommon or technical terms, and whatever else you think is worthwhile for your transcriptionist to know.
In terms of billing, Transcription Panda accepts debit, credit cards, or PayPal from regular customers, though business, universities, and corporations can contact Transcription Panda to set up invoice billing.
Web Dashboard
Transcription Panda's web interface is very clean, and I appreciate its clear organization.
Information and settings are divided across three center tabs on the page: Order History, My Profile, and Support.
The Order History section shows the details of all your orders, such as the length of the file, the service you selected, and status.
Unfortunately, there is no way to sort files by date or category, nor is there a mechanism for organizing your uploads into folders.
Once a file is complete, you can click on the View Files button to download your files, but that's the only option.
The My Profile section lets you update your name and password, but that's it.
As mentioned, there's no option to enable two-factor authentication.
The last tab, Support, populates the page with useful FAQs as well as a contact form for reaching out to a representative from the company, such as for removing a file or deleting your account.
Transcription Panda users do not have access to any sort of web editor for making changes to transcripts online.
Regardless of the how accurate a transcription service promises to be, no service we tested turned in perfect results.
Thus, subscribers must use some other solution such as OTranscribe to make changes.
From personal experience, it's a pain to try to write and edit at the same pace as an audio file, especially if you need to switch between programs frequently to do so.
Transcribing goes much faster with dedicated software, so it's disappointing that Transcription Panda lacks this feature.
The majority of the automatic and human-based transcription services I reviewed offered at least some sort of web editor with built-in playback controls.
Some services, such as Sonix, go one step further by adding extras such as calculated word confidence levels.
Transcription Panda also does not offer any mobile apps, which many others do.
Trint, for example, lets users record audio from a mobile device and submit the file for transcription directly from their phone.
Rev recently launched a Call Recorder app for iOS, which can record audio directly from a phone call.
Otter's mobile offerings are impressive as well; you can record, submit, and edit transcripts directly from the app.
How Accurate Is Transcription Panda?
To test out the accuracy of the transcription services, I upload the same 16-minute recording to each one.
The original recording of a three-person conference call came from an Olympus VN-722PC dedicated voice recorder.
It's not an easy recording, but this is the best way to stress test the services and clearly differentiate their performance.
It's also worth noting that since there are humans on the other end of these services, you may experience some variability in the accuracy results.
Transcription Panda finished the transcript process in 2:05 (hours:minutes).
It's hard to use the transcript time as a point of comparison since the return time depends on many non-controllable variables.
For example, we have no control over when a freelancer selects the job or how quickly that person works.
All of the services returned my transcript well within their promised range.
Rev was the quickest with a time of 1:16, but Transcription Panda managed to beat GoTranscript's 2:58.
Scribie took a little over a day at 29:02 for the same task, but that time still falls within its 36-hour return window.
Instead of comparing the entirety of each transcript, I choose three paragraphs, one from each speaker on the call.
For each snippet of the transcription, I mark an error wherever there is a missing, incorrect, or extra word.
I calculate the overall error rate by dividing the total number of mistakes into the total number of words across the combined sections (in this case, 201 words).
The sample for section A is a short introductory section.
Section B is slightly longer and uses more complex vocabulary.
Section C is even lengthier and contains some technical language.
Transcription Panda performed well in testing, producing a transcript with a five percent error rate.
This result is closer to what Transcription Panda promises with its Quick Draft service.
However, my testing methods certainly differ from Transcription Panda's internal evaluations.
In any case, Transcription Panda's result is only slightly behind Rev, our top-human-based transcription service, which had an error rate of three percent.
Transcription Panda did edge out Scribie with its six percent error rate and beat GoTranscript's (.72 Per Minute at GoTranscript) 10 percent rate.
Take a look at the chart below for the full results as well as a comparison to the automatic services we reviewed.
I retest all the automatic services with a simpler recording (two people, in-person) and calculated the error rate, in the same manner, using two samples, instead of three.
The automatic services fare better with this task as a whole, but they still aren't perfect.
Take a look at the chart below for the full results.
Panda-Powered Transcriptions
Transcription Panda is a reliable transcription service that produced very few errors in our accuracy tests.
However, the service does not offer much to differentiate itself from competitors and is missing some key functionality, such as a web editor, mobile apps, and the ability to easily remove files from your account.
That said, we do appreciate Transcription Panda's ease-of-use and willingness to work closely with its clients.
For a cheaper and more full-featured human-based transcription service, we recommend Editors' Choice Rev.
For simpler transcription jobs that can be handled with an automatic service, give Otter a shot.
