A transcription service can be invaluable for professionals or students who frequently rely on voice recordings for their work.
Sonix provides an automated service with lots of online editing tools and fast processing.
However, its high price and unreliable performance on complex files in our testing hold it back.
For simpler recordings, Sonix might work fine, but there are cheaper options that produce more accurate results.
Its inconsistent performance is disappointing because it offers novel features not found in competing services.
For a top-notch transcription experience, try Editors' Choice Rev instead.
Price Plans
Sonix's cheapest option, the Professional plan, costs $15 per month plus an additional $5 per hour of transcription (prorated).
This plan includes all of Sonix's base features (such as word confidence levels and its embeddable player) as well as secure file storage and email support.
Sonix is unusual in that it charges both a subscription fee and a transcription fee.
If you only need to use transcription services occasionally, then Sonix is not cost-effective.
The next step up, the Business plan, costs $80 per month plus $5 for each hour of transcription.
It adds multiuser access (with permissions and shared folders), private file uploading, centralized billing, and priority support.
The top-tier Enterprise plan costs $400 per month and includes everything in the Business plan.
It adds advanced administrator controls, detailed file-event tracking, and advanced training resources for users.
That fee doesn't include the transcripts themselves, however.
Sonix does not list the additional rate for the transcripts, instead asking potential customers to contact them directly.
The good news is that Sonix does not charge per person, so you can add as many people as you want to either the Business or Enterprise accounts.
You can also choose to pay on an annual basis at a slight discount.
With the annual discount, the subscription component of the Professional, Business, and Enterprise plans comes to $120, $800, and $4,000 per year, respectively.
The per-hour transcription pricing stays at $5 per hour for the Professional and Business accounts.
Anyone who signs up gets 30 minutes' worth of transcriptions to test out the service.
This trial option does not require a credit card, and I encourage you to see if it produces acceptable results for your needs before you commit to a full subscription.
Sonix is expensive compared with most automatic transcription services.
Sonix even says in one of its blog posts that "automated speech recognition has not only gotten so good, but it is also amazingly inexpensive (8 cents/min)," which is substantially cheaper than what it charges.
Temi costs only $0.10 per minute; Otter and Scribie's automatic services are both free.
That said, Sonix is a better deal than Trint's $40 per month subscription plan (for three hours' worth of transcriptions) as well as its $15 per hour pay-as-you-go rate (if you go past the first hour).
Human-based transcription services are more expensive.
Their rates (for the most part) change depending on the extras you select, but for the sake of comparison, we consider mid-tier rates.
Scribie's freelance service costs $1.20 per minute and GoTranscript runs about the same depending on the options and delivery time you select.
Rev ( at Rev) costs $1 per minute of transcription.
Getting Started and Security
To sign up for the trial, all you need to do is provide your name, email address, and password.
As noted, you don't need a credit card to get started.
Sonix does not offer any mobile apps, so you can only access your account via the web.
Most other services we reviewed allow you to take recordings and submit orders via a mobile device.
Otter goes one step further and lets you directly edit transcripts on your phone or tablet.
This functionality is particularly convenient for professionals and students frequently on the go or for those who simply don't want to carry around a dedicated voice recorder.
As with similar offerings, Sonix benefits from the privacy inherent in an automatic transcription service, meaning that no person ever looks at your file.
With a human-based service, at least one person needs access to your recordings so that they can complete the transcription.
Sonix says it uses fully secure TLS encryption to secure all the files you upload.
On a related note, Sonix also lets you define permission levels for each person in shared accounts, which we discuss later.
Keep in mind that Sonix does not have an option for enabling two-factor authentication at the time of this review, which could be a security risk for organizations or individuals who deal with sensitive information.
To be fair, no other transcription services I have reviewed offer this, either.
Web Dashboard
Sonix's web interface is primarily white and gray, with blue accents for icons, text, and other elements.
It looks fine and prioritizes the most important content and areas, which I appreciate.
Oddly, Sonix highlights quotes from famous people on most screens; I saw examples from John Steinbeck and Orson Welles.
The introductory message also changes with each page refresh, so Sonix may greet you with a formal "Welcome" or a more familiar "Howdy." Both add a subtle touch of personality.
Across the top of the interface, Sonix organizes using three tabs: Home, Upload, and Add User.
You get a search bar on the right-hand side of the screen and a profile icon for accessing settings.
You can upload files from your local device or from online sources like Dropbox or Google Drive.
The search bar is particularly useful in that it searches for terms within the text of all of your transcriptions (though not your notes).
Home is where you can find, organize, and upload transcripts.
The Personal account settings are pretty basic.
Sonix shows your billing information, displays your remaining transcription minutes, and lets you change your account.
Notably, Sonix also offers a Referral Program tab, in which you earn 100 additional minutes of transcriptions for each friend who subscribes to the service from an invite link you send them.
If you subscribe to the Business or Enterprise tier, a new option appears in the right-hand menu for business settings.
From here, you can add users to your account and manage other people's roles.
There are five main roles you can assign to each person who uses the Sonix account: Admins, Editors, Members, View Only, and Disabled.
This feature is invaluable for corporate environments for managers who want to keep some files private and make others accessible to everyone.
Take a look at the chart below for all the various roles.
Web Editor
Sonix's web editor interface retains the same visual design as the rest of the dashboard, which is to say that it looks clean and compact.
Across the top, you get the typical options available with other transcript services, such as playback speed and a list of keyboard shortcuts, as well as highlight and strikethrough tools.
Sonix also includes a useful find-and-replace tool, which worked fine in testing.
Most other services offer at least these capabilities, though GoTranscript (.72 Per Minute at GoTranscript) does not let you edit your transcripts online at all.
Sonix, however, goes beyond what most other services offer.
Foremost, Sonix calculates word confidence levels and assigns that value to a corresponding color scale.
If you click on the Quality menu option in the top bar, you can see the entire breakdown of the document, divided into words for which Sonix determined it was very, fairly, and somewhat confident.
You can toggle these colors in the text itself to get a general idea of where Sonix had the most difficulties.
In use, this tool is helpful in identifying areas where Sonix struggled, but it wasn't perfect.
Specifically, it did not highlight some entirely incorrect words in some sections.
It also does not mark areas where it entirely missed sections of the conversation.
I like the premise of this tool, but it needs further refinement.
One other neat (and exclusive) feature is Sonix's AudioText tool.
Essentially, this allows you to edit the uploaded audio file by making changes to the transcript text.
For example, if you delete a line in the transcript itself, Sonix cuts out the corresponding part of the audio file.
Rounding out the web editor's features are notes and speaker identification.
Sonix, like most automatic transcription services, had issues correctly identifying changes in speaker, but it's easy enough to separate blocks of the conversation on your own.
To define a new speaker, just click on the speaker option next to each paragraph.
You can add and remove names and select from any that you already defined.
For each block of text, you can also add notes.
These can take any shape, such as research notes or just general comments.
Additional Features
One of Sonix's coolest features is the ability to embed your transcript in other places across the web.
How does that work, you may ask? Sonix can generate HTML code that includes both the transcript audio and the transcript text combined in a neat package.
The widget itself includes the entire transcript text in a scrollable text box with audio playback tools on the bottom.
Sonix says this widget helps with SEO since the actual text of the transcription is discoverable by search engines on the page.
On top of that, the playback via the embed syncs up with the text, so you can easily follow along.
Furthermore, if you make any edits to the transcript via Sonix's web editor, even after you embed it on a website, the live embed will update as well.
If you want, you can even choose to make the transcript notes public as well.
Sonix also implements simple (but highly useful) call recording capabilities (currently in beta).
To use this feature, navigate over to the Options drop-down on the right-hand side of the screen and hit the Record Calls option.
All you need to do is to fill out your name, phone number, an optional PIN, and the number of the other person on the call.
After you initiate the recording, Sonix will call and connect on your end and then do the same for the other party.
It is your responsibility to inform the other person that Sonix is recording the call as to comply with any recording consent laws in your state.
At the time of publishing, you cannot add a third person to the call.
Competitor Scribie does offer an option for transcribing conference calls.
Accuracy
To test the accuracy of the transcription services, I uploaded 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 compare Sonix's automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine directly to other services.
Sonix finished the transcript process in about three minutes.
All of the automated transcription services completed the task in the range of three to four minutes.
The quickest human-based transcription, Rev, required around an hour for the same task.
Instead of comparing the entirety of each transcript, I chose three paragraphs, one from each speaker on the call.
For each snippet of the transcription, I marked an error wherever there was a missing, incorrect, or extra word.
I calculated 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.
Sonix produced dismal results in the first test (it had an error rate of 97 percent).
It entirely missed large chunks of the conversation, added extraneous words, or simply came up with similar-sounding (but incorrect) words in other sections.
These results surprised me, and Sonix later informed me that its service is designed to work with high-quality audio, such as podcasts.
While that may be the case, the same is true of every transcription service, automatic or otherwise; they all work best with perfect recordings.
However, as any podcast listener knows, recording perfect audio is not always possible, which is why we test with a non-ideal file.
Our goal is to differentiate the abilities of these services as much as possible.
To be fair, Sonix did inform me in the Quality menu dropdown that the transcript required significant editing and recommended I use a manual transcription service for better results.
Sonix does have a referral mechanism of sorts, known as Sonix Cleanup, but it is not easy to find on the website.
This section lists a couple of freelancer transcription services you can contact if you want a human to improve the results.
Even Trint, with its poor error rate of 78 percent, fared better.
For reference, automatic services do not perform nearly as well on this more-difficult transcription test, though Otter did record an admirable 17 percent error rate.
Rev, our top human-based transcription service, had an error rate of just 3 percent, and Scribie turned in a final copy with 6 percent.
Take a look at the full chart below for the complete breakdown.
I retested all the automatic services, including Sonix, 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 fared better with this task as a whole, but they still weren't perfect.
Sonix fell in line with the rest of the pack with an error rate of 23 percent and was not too far off from Trint's 14 percent or Temi's 21 percent.
The full results of the second test appear below.
Mixed Impressions
Sonix gets points for its collection of editing tools and web functionality, but those alone are not enough to make up for its poor accuracy.
Furthermore, it's expensive for an automatic service, especially considering that others in the category that cost less (or are free) also produce better results.
It should do a decent job on simple transcription tasks, but individuals and corporations should look elsewhere for anything more complex.
If Sonix's transcription performance improves, its excellent combination of editing and collaboration features could make it a strong, if pricey, contender.
For now, however, we recommend our Editors' Choice, Rev.
