TurboScribe Reviews

Summary: This is not worth the money as it doesn't provide the service as promised and they don't respond. I have since searched other reviews and I'm not alone, the general consensus is that this product sucks and is a rip off. I'm stuck with using this until I find abetter solution. Needless to say I have cancelled my subscription renewal.

Positive: CAVET EMPTOR!

Make sure you test this product completely on the basic monthly plan before making a decision, but the unlimited plan isn't what you might be expecting... (see below)

Negative: The Unlimited plan totally sucks. When you're on an unlimited plan you're told :

" Unlimited Transcriptions: Unlimited transcriptions for one person.
10 Hour Uploads: Each file can be up to 10 hours long / 5GB. Upload up to 50 files at a time.
All Features: Translation to 134+ languages. All transcription modes. Bulk exports. Unlimited storage.
Highest Priority: We'll always transcribe your files ASAP with the highest priority."

What you get - Yes, at first I was able to upload 50 AAC 4 hour audio files of a daily web broadcast show. My aim is to transcribe a 6 year archive of this content. And yes, it transcribed these overnight, probably taking about 14~16 hours to complete. So far so good. Next day I saw that my account was now switched to "Optimizing for High Volume:

"We're automatically optimizing your account to help you transcribe as much as possible (High Volume Mode).

"We'll prioritize transcribing as much as possible (rather than turnaround time).
"Files are typically transcribed in the order they are uploaded. If some files are more important, upload them first.
"If you receive a "Try Again Later" message, come back later to continue uploading files. To maximize the amount you can transcribe, upload larger batches every few days."

I thought this was great, but little did I know that this meant my Unlimited plan has now become very limited, from thereon in, I'm lucky if I can upload 8 files in a batch, but mostly it maxes out at 4 files and then I get the dreaded "Try Again Later" message. So at best I can get about 4 or 5 4 x file batched done in a day so long as I'm at my computer all day to manage it. There is no API or any automation, and the Unlimited plan is severely limited.

Once I did go away for a week, and when I returned I managed to get another 50 file batch done, but then immediately back to the 4 files "Try Again Later" routine. I paused again for 5 whole days and when I tried again, "Try Again Later" strikes agin without any 50 file batch. When reading the instruction notes, 50 x 4 hour files are well within scope, but they don't promise the frequency apart from "upload larger batches every few days". I considered 5 days to be a few, but apparently not what they promised!

Also, when I first tried Turboscribe out, I was able to get what I call "granular time stamps"; meaning almost every sentence or paragraph had a timestamp.

These files are easy for bother humans and computers to scan and to locate the time information to locate the text in the original media files. Certainly easter than speed reading and SRT text file.

However the download file options (text, word doc or pdf) only provide a timestamp when there is change of speaker, IF you have selected "Speaker Recognition". Obviously if the speaker does a 45 minute monologue without breaks, then you only get the timestamp at the beginning of the monologue. So to narrow it nown you need to search the srt or vtt caption files, but this doesn't always work as the caption files are parsed into short lines so searches won't find a phrase that have been split into 2 lines or 2 captions. Previously, my trial project was only 3 x 1 hour interviews, and I had copied an pasted the full granular transcript displayed on the dashboard page. I wrote to support asking about this and I got this unhelpful response:

"Thank you for your detailed feedback! I'm glad to hear you found TurboScribe useful 😊

Currently, TurboScribe does not have a dedicated export option that mirrors the "Open Transcript" format with granular timestamps for each paragraph. However, you could always copy paste the transcript from the online transcript viewer into your favorite document editor.

I appreciate your suggestion, and I will pass it along to our development team for consideration in future updates.

Best regards,

- Leif"

It seems that it is too difficult for them to provide the "Open Transcript" that is first generated but rather process that into a less useful form with sporadic timestamps, And copying and pasting and creating new documents for 50 4 hour shows is big ask if this becomes a daily chore, when their AI algorithms could do this as that peoduct already exists on their system, but they can't provide it for you.

But at least they did respond to me on that point, however all my subsequent emails since about the "Unlimited" issue have been ignored.