How to get a cleaner transcript

Accuracy is decided almost entirely by the recording. On clear speech, expect very few mistakes. On a phone in a busy café, expect to do some editing. Nothing you change after the fact matters as much as the ten seconds you spend on the microphone before you record.

Worth doing

• Move the microphone closer. Halving the distance does more than any setting we offer.
• Pick the language instead of leaving auto-detect. Auto-detect is good, but a definite answer is better — especially on short files or a strong accent.
• Record where the echo is not. Soft rooms beat big empty ones. A jacket over a laptop mic is a real trick, not a joke.
• Ask people not to talk over each other. Overlapping speech is the single biggest source of missing words, and it also confuses speaker labels.

Not worth doing

• Converting to a "better" format. A high-quality MP3 and a WAV of the same recording transcribe the same.
• Raising the volume of a distorted file. Clipping is not recoverable; it just gets louder.
• Uploading twice hoping for a different answer. The same audio produces the same transcript.

Fixing what is left

Names, jargon and acronyms are where a good transcript still slips. Click into the text to edit it directly — the changes save as you go and carry through to anything you download afterwards. Timestamps stay attached to the line, so click-to-play keeps working after an edit.

A transcript that is not merely imperfect but plainly wrong — empty, in the wrong language, or stopping early — is a different problem: see the transcript looks wrong.