Many professionals rely on recordings of interviews or meetings for their work.
However, transcribing these files can be difficult and time consuming.
That's where transcription services such as Trint can be helpful.
Trint's automated transcription service has a lot going for it, including quick turnaround times, an excellent online editor, and good security policies.
However, the core offering (the transcription itself) doesn't produce usable results from complex audio files.
Still, if you only plan to use it for simple recordings, Trint is a solid choice.
Otherwise, Editors' Choice Rev, a human-powered transcription service, is a better option.
Pricing and File Support
Trint has both per-hour and subscription-based pricing plans.
The base transcription level option costs $15 per hour, with unlimited editing and sharing.
You can buy these hours in bulk if you want, since they are usable for a year.
The $40 per month plan grants you a total of three hours of transcribed audio.
If you go beyond three hours on this plan, Trint charges $13.20 per every extra hour.
The $120 per month option opens up 10 hours of uploads and costs $12 per every extra hour you use.
Both higher tier individual plans also offer unlimited editing and sharing, with unused hours rolling over for each month.
All plans operate on a rolling 30-day basis and can be canceled at any time.
Trint also offers Team and Enterprise accounts.
Trint's Team account is for groups of up to 50 users and includes team admin roles, multiple user accounts, and centralized billing.
Trint's Enterprise tier for organizations with more than 50 individuals includes all the features of the individual and team accounts, as well as APIs, single-sign-on options, and an enterprise dashboard.
Interested organizations need to fill out Trint's dedicated site form for price quotes.
Compared to other automatic services, Trint is expensive.
Temi only costs $0.10 per minute of audio.
Otter offers up to 600 minutes of free recordings per month, and Scribie's automatic service is also completely free.
Sonix is the only other automatic service to offer a subscription service.
Sonix's base account tier costs $15 per month + $5 per hour of transcription work.
That makes it roughly equivalent to Trint's pricing, depending on how many hours of audio you need to transcribe.
Rev ( at Rev) , our Editors' Choice, costs $1 per minute of audio.
Scribie's middle-of-the-road option costs $1.20 per minute.
Neither service offers a subscription account tier, but it is worth noting that these are both manual transcription services.
Trint supports a variety of file types.
For audio, it recommends MP3, M4A, and AAC.
For video, your best options are MP4, WMA, MOV, and AVI.
If your files don't match any of those specifications, it's easy enough to convert them to another type either online or with a dedicated conversion program.
You can export from Trint to Word docs, SubRips (a common subtitle text file format), VTT files (a format usually used for displaying timed text tracks with HTML5 video elements), or Interactive Transcript files (similar to regular transcripts and subtitles, but with additional tracking and highlighting for users).
Trint's Web Interface
I opted to test out the beta version of Trint's web interface, which looks cleaner and is better organized than the older version.
The Profile icon in the upper-right side of the screen houses six sections: General, Settings, Vocab Builder, Plan, Uploads, and Invoices.
This area of the console has a good design, letting you easily switch among the subcategories via a horizontal menu.
The Settings category, in particular, offers good customizability, with the ability to easily toggle formatting and timestamping options.
Two-Factor Authentication is not an option.
Even though none of the transcription services I tested support this security feature, multi-factor authentication should be standard.
At the top of the main page, Trint places several options for creating folders and duplicating items, as well as moving, exporting, deleting, and renaming files.
You can even apply actions to multiple items at the same time.
I appreciate having all these tools at my disposal, but I did encounter limitations.
For example, Trint does not give you tools to sort files and, at the time of this update, does not include a search bar.
For individuals and teams with tons of files, this is problematic.
Trint should also allow users to drag and drop files into folders, which it doesn't.
Rounding out the interface, Trint includes a Recent Trints section, but this showed me the same list as the main area, including transcription jobs as far back as six months ago.
Trint displays your remaining transcription hours on the bottom left part of the page.
To upload a file, hit the yellow upload icon that sits underneath the profile section.
Here, you get a wide variety of upload options, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Gmail, and URL.
You can even record a video on the spot if you're in a bind.
Next, you select a language and choose whether to opt into Trint's Vocab Builder feature, which lets you add words or phrases from your transcripts to a database that Trint consults when processing your files.
Other transcription services, including human-based ones, offer a similar capability, even going as far as to let you provide speaker IDs up front.
Note that Trint only confirms that the Vocab Builder will remain free through Sept.
2018.
Transcription With Trint
As mentioned earlier, Trint is an automated transcription process, meaning that no human works on your file.
Trint's hybrid, AI-based processing software, which combines Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) with some more traditional human models, does the work instead.
Keep in mind that automated transcription services typically have much lower accuracy rates when it comes to transcription services, and Trint is no exception.
In our testing (more on this later), it produced far less accurate transcripts than all of the human-based services, including Rev, Scribie, and Transcription Panda.
That said, Trint and other automatic services work fine for less complex files.
Trint says that it can process an audio file in about the time equivalent to the length of the file.
So, for example, a 30-minute audio or video file should take roughly 30 minutes to complete.
In testing, the service was a good deal faster than these minimum speeds.
It returned my 16-minute test file in about three minutes.
Files are protected with 256-bit AES encryption, and Trint has a strict no-tolerance policy for unauthorized employee access.
Online Editor
One of Trint's best features is its online editor.
That's good, since you transcriptions will likely require quite a few corrections.
The editor's minimal design features lots of white space and simple button layouts.
Unfortunately, there is no dark mode, which is not ideal for extended editing sessions.
Across the top, there are icons for Find and Replace, Highlight, Strike, and Vocab Builder.
The Highlight option is particularly useful; when you highlight a sentence or even a few paragraphs, the editor plays back just those sections.
It's handy for when need to focus on specific parts of the transcript.
For each paragraph, Trint lets you manually type in a name, since speaker identification is not a strong suit of automated services.
A dropdown list of already-used speakers in each transcript would make this process easier.
Trint organizes the playback controls towards at the bottom left-hand side of the screen, with dedicated Play/Pause, Play Highlights Rewind buttons.
Moving to the right on the bottom pane, Trint shows playback speed options, general time information, and a waveform overview of the audio, which is useful for quickly scrubbing through files.
In the bottom right corner, users get a settings panel with punctuation and time options, as well as a list of keyboard shortcuts.
I would like to see Trint mark potential areas of difficulty in the text to make the editing process easier.
Both Scribie and Sonix include a similar functionality that analyzes your text for potentially problematic sections.
Trint's Mobile App
I tested Trint's mobile app for iOS on an iPhone 8 running iOS 11.
Trint currently does not offer an Android app.
Trint's app is similar to Rev's and GoTranscript's, allowing you to take recordings and submit them for transcription.
However, the app has some significant limitations, in that you can't access any of files you uploaded from the desktop.
Otter is much more robust; it organizes all of your uploads in a clean interface, includes excellent sharing options, and allows users to edit transcripts from within the app.
Setting up the app is simple.
Just download Trint from the App Store and log in to your account.
This brings you to the attractive Recordings home screen, where you can view all of your past mobile recordings or take a new one.
I like the clean and efficient design, though I do wish there was a dark mode.
I would also like to see Trint add the ability to organize recordings in some meaningful way.
If you tap on a recording, you can view basic information, add a note or description, share, or upload it to Trint for transcription.
Before it uploads the audio, it makes you confirm that: the background is noise-free, the speakers have clear accents, the microphone was close by, and there is not constant overlapping talking (though you can choose to opt out of this check).
The last step is to select the language of the conversation.
Once Trint processes your file, you can view the complete transcript from the mobile app, though you cannot edit it directly or export it to another app to make changes.
You have to use Trint's web editor to do so.
How Accurate Is Trint?
I use the same 16-minute recording to test the accuracy of all transcription services.
The original recording of a three-person conference call comes from an Olympus VN-722PC dedicated voice recorder.
It's a challenging recording, though all the voices are clearly audible.
Trint returned the transcript in about three minutes.
All the other automated transcription options processed the same file in about the sane time as well.
All of the manual services took quite a bit longer, though Rev's work came in at a reasonable 1 hour and 16 minutes.
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 was a missing or an extra word, taking into account that some words might appear in different places on the line.
I calculate the overall error rate by dividing the total number of mistakes into the total number of words across the combined sections.
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.
Trint performed poorly in the first test and had a 78 percent error rate, which is essentially unusable.
For comparison, Temi turned in a file with a 44 percent error rate, while Scribie's automated option turned in a copy with only a 42 percent error rate.
For comparison, the top two manual transcription service, Rev, only had a three percent error rate.
Take a look at the full chart below for the complete breakdown.
I retested all the automatic services, including Trint, with a simpler two-person, in-person recording and calculated the error rate in the same manner, using two samples instead of three.
The automatic services fared better with this task, but they still weren't perfect.
Trint actually took the top spot in this test, with an error rate of 14 percent.
Otter and Temi respectively turned out transcripts with a 21 percent error rate.
Give Trint a Try
Transcription services, such as Trint, are a great way to save time and be more productive.
Trint is fine for simple transcription jobs, but for more complex files, it's a no-go.
You should test Trint's service on your own to see if it meets your specific needs.
Trint's editor is well designed and the subscription-based pricing model is a good value, but again, it won't work for everyone.
We recommend Editors' Choice Rev's human-based transcription service instead.
Rev is more expensive, but it is highly accurate, has a good interface, and turns around files in a reasonable time.
