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Scribie is the most affordable human-powered transcription service we tested, at just 80¢ per minute. It first uses AI to transcribe your audio, then human editors clean up the copy. Scribie was as accurate as Happy Scribe, though with a few more spelling differences than other transcription apps. (These included things like using “okay” instead of “ok” or “all together” instead of “altogether.”) It also produced near misses like “study” instead of “steady.” It offers fewer export options, with only Word, PDF, and text formats supported, with no subtitle or caption formats included. It was very good at handling crosstalk and repetitive or filler words, though.

Tasers are supposed to allow police officers to subdue violent individuals without killing them. A police officer can "take down" a threatening suspect without worrying that a stray bullet might kill or injure an innocent bystander.

Happy Scribe offers both human and AI transcription, and the accuracy of its human transcription came in just under GoTranscript’s AI accuracy. It handled crosstalk well, and text was highly readable, but it was often altered from the spoken record. “Did they set a timeline?” was changed to “What was the timeline that they set?” That’s close, but the meaning was changed. Its transcript editor app looks more modern than our top pick’s and includes collaboration features it doesn’t (including comments). However, multiple people cannot edit a transcript at the same time (as you could in Google Docs, say).

It is a priority for CBC to create products that are accessible to all in Canada including people with visual, hearing, motor and cognitive challenges.

For this guide, we considered how the field has changed since we wrote Wirecutter’s original transcription services guides in 2018. Then we read through personal recommendations from New York Times reporters, along with roundups from The Verge and PC Mag. We also took into account recommendations from NYU Libraries, the University of Michigan Library, and Harvard University, among others, as well as forums and social media.

For human transcription, you can then choose between clean verbatim (without filler words such as “um” and “you know”) or full verbatim for an additional 25¢ per minute. Additional paid add-ons include timestamps, support for three or more speakers, and support for low-quality audio.

Alternatively, you can use it in third-party wrappers, including MacWhisper for Mac, Aiko for iOS, and Speech Transcribe for Windows PCs with CUDA-compatible Nvidia GPUs. Or, you could use hosted versions of Whisper via automation tools like Zapier or Make, or build it into in-house apps with OpenAI’s Whisper API.

The procedures, conducted by U.S.-based lab National Technical Systems, found that 10 per cent of the X26 model Tasers produced more electrical current than the weapon's specifications.

Most powerful stun gun on Amazon

We submitted these clips to each service, testing both AI and human transcription options where possible. With human transcription services, we added technical terms from the fourth script to the services’ custom dictionaries and paid for one-day turnaround time.

Tasers work by passing electricity through a pair of wires. Weighted barbed hooks at the ends of the wires are propelled toward the target by compressed air.

Arizona-based Taser International makes virtually all of the stun guns being used today. The technical term for a stun gun is a "conducted energy device" (CED) or "conducted energy weapon" (CEW).

Then a little more than a month later, the RCMP said it is pulling all older model M-26 Tasers from service nationwide, after the B.C. government announced that such weapons don't meet the manufacturer's specifications.

With the transcripts in hand, we then compared each transcript against our original, hand-transcribed copy to compare for readability and accuracy. Our primary criteria is accuracy in transcribing spoken words; that’s the sole feature worth paying for.

You can also choose your timeframe: Six- to 12-hour transcription turnaround starts at $2.75 per minute, with one-day ($1.43 per minute), three-day ($1.21 per minute), and five-day (99¢ per minute) options also available. In our testing, we used one-day turnaround with default options, plus timestamps for two of the clips. This worked well, even with accented, noisy audio.

It's possible for an electrical circuit to have high voltage, but low current. It would be analogous to a dentist's water jet used to remove plaque: high pressure, but low flow.

Collaboration is similarly basic: You can copy a sharing link to the transcription editor, where colleagues can edit the text but not actually save the edits. Or, you can add transcripts to a shared workspace for team access with the same basic editor features. You can filter through transcripts by date and order but cannot search through all recordings together.

GoTranscript’s editor is basic, but the service includes a number of features that can speed up your work. You can get a free AI transcript preview of the first two minutes of your audio, which allows you to decide if the quality is sufficient before paying—and if it’s not, you can upgrade to a human transcription. You’ll get your transcript emailed as a Word document, so you can use it without having to re-open the site. And it’s HIPAA compliant, so it’s ready for health care use.

It’s geeky: You can run it in Terminal on Macs and Linux PCs, or Command Prompt on Windows. It’ll run slowly on traditional Intel and AMD processors, but it can deliver transcripts as fast as 1 minute per minute of audio on modern ARM CPUs, including Apple’s M1 and newer, or on CUDA-compatible Nvidia GPUs. Whisper’s Large v2 model was the most accurate in our tests; Small was faster, making it more usable on Intel machines, but it was less accurate, while Large v3 seemed to try too hard and overcorrected at times.

"There's no question that there are certainly lots of documented examples in Canada where had we not had the Taser and had to respond with more traditional options, that it could have resulted in a higher level of force," said Gillis. "For example, the firearm: … with a firearm, there are only two outcomes … it's going to be a permanent injury or a loss of life."

Quebec ordered the mandatory testing of all stun guns manufactured prior to 2005. The government later pulled all of its Taser stun guns off the street for testing after lab results revealed problems with some of the weapons.

It’s easy to access transcriptions, but editing and collaboration features are basic. Once transcription is completed, you’ll get an email with a link to a Word Document. Since you don’t need to be logged in to access the doc, you can forward a transcript to a colleague without needing to share account access.

The results are only slightly less accurate than what you’d get from our top pick, but enough that you’ll need to more closely edit transcriptions before publishing them. It also offers no collaboration features, requiring workarounds to handle transcripts as a team.

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Rev offers both human and AI-powered transcription (the latter also powers Temi, a pick in an earlier version of this guide). It has the most modern, professional editor of the services we tested, with version control for edits and collaboration features to share transcripts (though collaborators cannot edit simultaneously). Unfortunately, it wasn’t as accurate as our current picks, with 98% accurate human transcription and only 98.6% accuracy with AI. Names were especially troublesome. Rev AI transcribed “Joel Embiid” as “Joelle and Bead,” wrote “friends” instead of “France,” and had odd issues with decimal numbers. Human transcriptions were better, but included some AI-like artifacts such as “as large as” being written as “f / f,” and meaning-changing mistakes including “caused” instead of “crossed.”

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A coroner concluded Dziekanski died as a result of the stress from both the Taser stuns and the struggle with police as they pinned him to the ground and handcuffed him.

GoTranscript cleans up transcriptions for readability, which generally is good, though in our experience this also sometimes affected quality. Filler words including “you know,” “like,” and “kind of” were removed, and a misspoken “there’s a qualified” was turned into the more accurate “there’s a qualifier.” And you’ll have to watch out for fillers that are also modifiers, such as an instance where “kind of” was removed, which mildly altered the meaning of a sentence.

The company says there are none and that Taser devices are among the safest use-of-force options available. Critics argue that there hasn't been enough research into the safety of stun guns.

Reduct is an online video editing app that transcribes audio, too—a video take on what Descript does for podcast editing. Transcripts show up in real time as the AI completes them, with a quick first-pass (taking one minute per minute of audio) followed minutes later by a more accurate final transcription (around three minutes per minute of audio in our tests, which is slow for AI transcription). It missed an entire phrase on the end of one clip and added extraneous phrases to the end of two other clips. Reduct’s nicer editor and collaboration features could make it worth considering if you’re primarily transcribing videos then publishing the copy as captions, as long as you edit transcriptions before publication.

GoTranscript’s site mentions that it “uses AI as a tool to enhance the efficiency of human transcriptionists,” which may be part of the reason its human transcripts are so accurate and delivered so fast. To improve accuracy, you can email the GoTranscript team to add industry-specific flags to your account for medical, technical, and legal terms, or custom words to add to your account’s dictionary. It would be nice to have an in-app dictionary feature to add custom words on your own, which is something offered by many competing services, including Scribie and Rev.

Trint is designed around transcribing large volumes of audio every month. It offers unlimited transcription starting at $100 per month, in a collaborative editor complete with full-text search, sharing, and comments. That is helpful for transcribing large volumes of audio for subtitles, with quick AI transcription that you can clean up manually in the app. It includes a full-featured mobile app so that you can get text transcribed on the go, and it supports exports in a wide variety of subtitles. Unfortunately, it was just 95% accurate in our tests, far off our picks. It also made errors that changed the meaning, like transcribing “steady” as “study,” “nebulously” as “nebulous Lee,” “That’s always gonna” as “I was always going to,” “right now” as “if I know,” and more—not close enough to publish without a second check.

GoTranscript provides transcripts with over 99% accuracy from human transcribers in less than a day, at more affordable rates than many human-powered alternatives. Its custom AI transcription is also the most accurate automated transcription service we tested, as well.

Buying hours of transcription credit at a time requires slightly more upfront investment than GoTranscript, which bills directly per minute of audio transcribed, and the subscription options add to the complexity. On average, though, Vook.ai works out to around 5¢ per minute of audio transcribed, one fourth of GoTranscript AI’s 20¢ per minute cost.

We noted where transcription services cleaned up text, removing filler words—such as “like” or “you know”—and did not count that, or when they broke up less-common compound words like “globetrotting” into “globe trotting,” or transcribing “the” as “a” against accuracy. And when the wrong word was used, we counted that against an app’s accuracy score, using that along with pricing, features, and speed to choose the best transcription service.

TASER self defense

The city of Montreal also held public hearings about police use of stun guns in April 2010. A report is expected later in the year.

Transcripts make searching through recordings as easy as searching any other document, simplifying finding specific quotes and action items from a meeting or jumping to the correct timestamp in audio. They help journalists, legal and medical professionals, and others who rely on interviews and spoken conversations, speeding up their work and increasing note accuracy. And they make podcasts and videos accessible to a wider audience. As a side benefit, they help listeners search through shows and even aid search engines in indexing your content.

Amnesty International says that between 2001 and August 2008, 334 Americans died after Taser shocks. The stun gun was deemed to have caused or contributed to at least 50 of those deaths, Amnesty says, citing medical examiners and coroners. Most suspects were unarmed, and many were subjected to repeated or prolonged shocks, according to Amnesty.

Its transcripts are 98.7% accurate on average. In our tests, Vook.ai was second only to GoTranscript in AI transcription accuracy. The results were good enough to use with only light edits.

In December 2009, Paul Kennedy, head of the Commission for Complaints Against the RCMP, the RCMP watchdog agency, had released a damning report on the conduct of RCMP involved in the Dziekanski's death. Specifically, Kennedy criticized the RCMP's training practices and use of force guidelines, saying the force appears to have dropped historic guidelines directing officers to minimize intervention and use the least amount of force required to get the best results.

It missed one name (“Sagen” was transcribed as “Sajan”) and used British spelling for “catalogue,” with no option to choose between US and British spelling. It also had a few issues with our final test clip: The pangram was written without spaces, “AI” was written as “AVI,” and “streaming” had become “steaming.” Perhaps most surprisingly, one clip had a phantom “Thank you” added to the end.

Tasers are designed to incapacitate a person through up to five centimetres of clothing. Taser International says the electrical pulse is delivered at a high voltage because the electric current has to pass through clothing and air — neither of which is a good conductor of electricity — to make a complete circuit with the target's skin.

Statistics prepared by RCMP officers show that Mounties drew or threatened to draw their Tasers more than 1,400 times in 2007, up from 597 in 2005.

In some cases, the current was up to 50 per cent stronger than specified. The X26 Tasers were manufactured before 2005 and are one of the most commonly used models.

Of other inaccuracies, “vlog” was mistaken as “blog,” “C#” was written as “CShark,” and “AI” as “AGI.” A single word—“Caucasus”—was marked as “[unintelligible]” rather than being guessed, which is what many other services would do.

Nova Scotia's justice minister also ordered police departments in the province to stop using an older model of Taser in December 2008.

For AI transcripts, GoTranscript doesn’t prompt you to add any additional services, as AI transcriptions list speakers by default but don’t offer timestamps. As a nice bonus, you can click a “Check AI Accuracy” button when ordering an AI transcript to get a quick preview of the first two minutes of your audio’s text. If the results aren’t accurate enough, you can upgrade to human transcription.

That has improved their accuracy but can lead to surprising mistakes. For example, in our testing “as large as” was transcribed by multiple AI services as “F/f.” Even more strangely, the decimal “1.82%” was transcribed as “1.8199999999999998%” by one service. Yet overall, today’s AI transcriptions are 96% accurate on average. Close, but still noticeably incorrect at times.

The Braidwood Inquiry in its final report, released in June 2010, concluded the RCMP was not justified in using a Taser against Dziekanski.

Taser International said in August 2009 that it would challenge Braidwood's preliminary findings at the Supreme Court of British Columbia. The case is scheduled to be heard in July 2010.

Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, is now built into nearly every new Windows laptop coming out this year. Here’s what you should know about how to use Copilot.

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Vook.ai supports files up to three hours long (or 2 GB), versus GoTranscript’s larger 4 GB upload limit. Longer recordings will need to be split into shorter clips for transcription, or require an Ultra plan, which costs roughly $55 per month.

If you need to work on transcriptions as a team: Descript (free for 1 hour of transcripts per month; from $19/month for 10 hours of transcripts) was designed as a tool for editing podcasts and videos, but it’s also a great AI-powered transcription service with a modern, collaborative editor reminiscent of collaborative notes and the to-do list app Notion.

At a quarter of the cost of our top pick, this service offers marginally less accurate AI transcripts that arrive in less than half the time. But it has fewer features and can struggle with crosstalk.

It was 98.4% accurate in our tests, but it didn’t handle speech impediments or crosstalk well—especially compared with our top pick. It also didn’t clean up filler speech or identify speakers by default, though it does include AI features to add those after the core transcription has been completed.

It uses OpenAI’s Whisper to generate fast, accurate transcriptions. What makes Vook.ai one of the best affordable transcription services is that, at its core, it’s an easy-to-use take on OpenAI Whisper. (According to the development team, it’s powered by “added layers upon OpenAI’s Whisper algorithm, that we run on serverless GPUs.”) The results were slightly more accurate than default Whisper models in our tests.

Tasersfor sale

iOS 18, which rolls out to iPhones this fall, is jam-packed with AI-powered features like generative emoji, photo cleanup tools, and ChatGPT integration.

And the transcriptions are good. Surprisingly so. In 2018, Wirecutter found the best AI transcription tools to be 73% accurate. Today, even the least accurate AI transcription is 94% accurate—and, surprisingly, the best AI transcription services, including OpenAI’s free Whisper transcription engine, are somewhat more accurate than the least-precise human-powered transcriptions.

In Canada, however, Tasers are a prohibited weapon. Only one company can import them into Canada under a special permit, and they can only sell the devices to law enforcement agencies, said RCMP Cpl. Greg Gillis, who trains police officers in how to use Tasers. Each Taser sale is registered and tracked, much like a handgun, he said.

Stun gun vs Taser

GoTranscript is the best transcription service for highly accurate human transcription, and it also delivers better-than-average AI-powered transcripts. It’s worth paying for when transcription accuracy is crucial.

It's possible to suffer a fatal shock from a household electrical socket, at just 120 volts with 15 amps, if enough current passes through the body.

Transcription Panda is a human-powered transcription service with the most accurate transcription we tested—but it costs $1 more per minute than GoTranscript with one-day turnaround and takes nearly six times as long to transcribe the same audio. It’s also very basic: You just upload audio and get a Word document emailed back to you. There’s no sharing, editing, or playback features. The few errors the service did make were more likely to change the meaning of a sentence than those from GoTranscript’s human transcripts, too; “instance” was transcribed as “insurance,” for example.

Otter is built around transcribing meetings, with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet integrations. Its best use case is to surface data from calls, with automated AI summaries of transcripts, a chat bot that you can ask questions about a call, and graphs tracking who talked the most. It’s less useful for working with transcripts, though, with a limited editor that only lets you copy a single paragraph at a time. It offers few export options and is also somewhat less accurate than the competition.

Figures compiled by the Canadian Police Research Centre suggest that most mid-size police forces use stun guns between 50 to 60 times a year on average. They were used 51 times in 2006 by police officers in Quebec.

Taser International said CBC made scientific errors by failing to spark-test the weapons before firing them, a process the company recommends police officers do on a regular basis. But engineers who reviewed the testing protocol for CBC said the tests were based on solid practices.

Apple Voice Control and Nuance Dragon Home 15 are the best dictation tools we’ve tested, though both struggle with some accents and speech impediments.

If you want free, locally processed AI transcripts: OpenAI Whisper—the engine behind Vook.ai and likely other commercial transcription tools—is an open-source, MIT-licensed, Python-powered transcription model that you can run for free on any computer. Its Large model was 98.7% accurate in our tests, while its faster Small model was 97.7% accurate.

GoTranscript is safe to use with sensitive personal information. The service uses in-house–developed transcription software, promises limited access to personally identifiable information to employees and transcribers who need access to data to perform specific tasks, is HIPAA-compliant, and encrypts data while stored and in transit. Audio is stored for seven days after transcription is complete, while text transcripts are stored in your account until you delete them. If needed, you can also request the GoTranscript team to sign an NDA for an additional layer of privacy around your audio and transcripts.

Current, measured in amperes or amps, is the rate of flow of electrons through a wire, similar to the rate of water flow in a pipe, measured in litres per second.

GoTranscript uses AI to enhance its human transcription, and that shows in the year-over-year improvement in its transcription quality. The web app is fairly basic, with simple sharing functions, plus a text editor with audio playback that highlights words as they’re spoken.

Pocket taser

In July 2005, for example, a Chicago medical examiner ruled that the death of a man in February 2005 was the result of being shot with a Taser by Chicago police. Media reports said it was the first time a death had been linked directly to a police stun gun, although the medical examiner said the victim also had a lot of methamphetamine in his system.

A couple of names were misspelled—slightly more than with GoTranscript; “Roe” came back as “Rowe,” “Bhupinder” as “Bupinda.” It didn’t handle crosstalk as well as our top pick and missed a few smaller words including “did,” “they,” and “yeah.” Percent was written out as a word, instead of a percent symbol.

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The need for a standalone transcription service, though, has become less critical. Automatic transcripts for meetings in apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams may be enough to get general notes. Automated YouTube transcripts could suffice when starting a new channel. If transcripts are only nice-to-have for your work, a free automated solution is best.

Airport security called the RCMP for help after Dziekanski allegedly was pounding on windows and throwing chairs and computer equipment.

In 2008, the RCMP, which introduced Tasers into its arsenal in 2001, had 2,800 Tasers and 9,100 officers who were trained to use them.

Paid transcription services should offer transcripts in a variety of formats, including Word and standard caption formats.

I’ve been testing and writing about software professionally since 2010, and I have used both human and AI-powered transcription services for interviews and meetings throughout my career. I extensively use dictation for mobile typing, across multiple languages, and regularly use transcripts to build note summaries after meetings.

Beyond that, the transcripts were clean and readable, and the AI handled crosstalk, repeated words, and other verbal issues well. The results are close enough to perfect that, for clear audio without uncommon words, you might be able to use them without any edits.

In our tests, we were able to get two minutes of audio transcribed in a minute or less, with greater than 98% accuracy. The cost? Around 5¢ per minute.

Alberta will be testing all of its police Tasers after pulling 50 that failed to work properly in independent tests, the province announced in April 2009.

Its human transcriptions were over 99% accurate. The words the human transcribers missed were more likely to be filler words—for example, writing “while” instead of “and while”—rather than entirely incorrect words. Names that were frequently misspelled by other transcription services (including “Sagen Maddalena,” “Will Shaner,” and “Joel Embiid”) were transcribed accurately. Transcripts were close enough to perfect that we had to look closely for differences.

For anyone with disabilities or mobility challenges, smart devices can be profoundly empowering and can enable more independent living.

None offer the accuracy of our top picks, but all offer passable transcripts that would be good enough for a quick search through meeting notes or to save time in looking up a quote.

We compared each service’s interface and listed core features, including supported audio formats and collaboration options. And we timed how long each service took to provide transcripts and respond to support queries, and noted the total cost per minute.

Although its mobile app is only usable to record conversations to then be submitted to GoTranscript, and its web editor includes fewer features than some competitors, its accuracy and speed are the best we’ve found.

But when accurate transcripts are crucial enough to your work that you would otherwise spend hours painstakingly transcribing or editing automated transcripts, paying for human transcription or higher-quality automated transcripts is the best choice. Paid transcription tools also include features to share transcripts, edit them manually, and export the text in caption and subtitle formats. All of these are worth paying for when transcripts are a core part of your work.

In March 2009, the RCMP watchdog released new figures showing RCMP officers used stun guns 1,106 times in 2008, about 30 per cent less than the previous year. The numbers included incidents when officers drew Tasers from their holsters but didn't fire.

Taser International also says that while its device can deliver up to 50,000 volts in an open air arc only, it does not deliver that much voltage to a person's body. The company says its Taser X26 delivers an average of 1,200 volts.

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Transcripts show up in your account moments after they’re ordered. The service includes a basic editor, with rich text editing features including bold and italic font options. You can toggle timestamps and speaker names, copy text, or export transcripts in Word, PDF, Markdown, or .st subtitle format.

The report called for an independent provincial body to investigate police actions and warned that public confidence in the RCMP was flagging.

Vook.ai includes fewer editor features than GoTranscript, and it doesn’t offer any human-powered transcription or editing options. It’s also less competent at transcribing crosstalk than GoTranscript, which is important for recordings with multiple speakers.

The jury determined the company was negligent for failing to warn police that prolonged deployment of the stun gun could increase the risk of cardiac arrest.

Interestingly, the opening pangram in the final audio clip was merged together as a single word, just as in GoTranscript’s AI copy, leading us to wonder if the same core models underlie GoTranscripts’ AI transcription.

Unlike our top pick, there are no sharing or collaboration features, though Vook.ai does have an email export option to send a transcript directly to a colleague. Similar to GoTranscript, though, Vook.ai doesn’t offer universal search across all of your transcripts (something offered by Alice, Rev, and Descript). The only way to organize transcripts is by their read or unread status, or with tags.

Vook.ai is a highly accurate, AI-powered transcription service with one of the lowest prices we could find. On average, you’ll pay 5¢ per minute of audio transcribed—and will receive completed transcripts in less time than the duration of the audio recording, with speaker labels and timestamps.

Electricity is the flow of electrons through a wire or other conductor. Voltage and current are two separate ways of measuring electricity.

According to some psychologists, a person with excited delirium acts agitated, violent, sweats profusely and is unusually strong and insensitive to pain. Then, the victim's heart races and eventually stops beating.

Voltage is the amount of force that is driving a flow of electrons. If you imagine electricity as water flowing through a pipe, the voltage is the water pressure in the pipe.

GoTranscript includes a basic online editor where you can download the transcript in plain text, PDF, or subtitle formats, customize speaker names, and edit the text. You can listen to your audio synced with the text, though you may need to re-upload your audio if it’s been days since ordering your transcript.

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It keeps transcripts in-house. User data is stored on EU-based servers and RSA encrypted, and transcriptions run on an OpenAI Whisper model run on Vook.ai’s infrastructure. “Audio files or transcripts are not shared to any third party,” the Vook.ai team told us, unless users request DeepL translation or GPT-powered transcript summaries. Automated transcriptions don’t require a human to listen to audio or read the transcript, keeping transcription private by design. It’s not HIPAA certified, though, which makes GoTranscript a better choice for medical and legal use-cases if compliance is required.

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Stun gun

Matthew Guay is a writer focused on software and productivity. Previously he was a writer for the automation platform Zapier and a founding editor of the software community Capiche. With more than 1,500 logins in his password manager, he has lost track of how much software he has tested.

The service gives you a preview transcription of the first couple of minutes of your recording for free, to check its quality before paying for a full transcription. And it can import nearly any audio or video format, as well as export transcripts in a wide range of formats, to slot easily into your existing production workflows.

After spending 35 hours testing 15 transcription tools, including human and AI-powered options, we found that GoTranscript is the best service for those who need the most accurate transcripts. If you’re willing to work with slightly less accurate but far faster AI transcription, Vook.ai is the best affordable transcription service.

Initially, the Mounties speculated that he died from a rare condition called excited delirium. Excited delirium is described as an agitated state in which a person experiences an irregular heartbeat and suddenly dies. It can happen to psychiatric patients and people using drugs such as cocaine. But critics charge that excited delirium is not a valid medical term.

Your first 30 minutes of transcription are free, then you can purchase credit in two-, five-, or 10-hour increments, or customized blocks of time. Another option is to purchase a subscription starting at around $11 per month for five hours of transcription, with transcription billed per minute and charged in euros. Leftover credit can be used later.

Anyone who records large amounts of spoken audio and video—for interviews, podcasts, videos, meetings, dictated notes, and more—can benefit from a transcription service.

By comparison, electrical outlets in Canada deliver 120 volts of electricity, and the current they carry depends on the appliance that's plugged into them. A 60-watt light bulb, for example, pulls 0.5 amps, while a toaster pulls about five amps.

Similarly, Apple Intelligence—available starting September 16 in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, on iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 and newer, and iPad or Macs with M1 CPUs or newer—generates real-time transcripts from audio recordings in Notes with AI summaries. We wouldn’t be surprised to see direct audio file transcription for both platforms in a future update.

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This is not a comprehensive list of all transcription services we have tested. We have removed any services that are no longer available or do not meet our current requirements.

If you want free, good enough transcripts: Check your favorite work applications to see if they include transcription features. Microsoft Word includes automated transcription with Office 365, Slack adds a transcript to any audio shared in chat, and most video call apps including Google Meet and Zoom offer automated transcripts.

Vook.ai is also far easier to use than OpenAI Whisper, which requires running Python code in Terminal on Macs and Linux or Command Prompt on Windows, or using a third-party wrapper for either Mac or PC—something less technically inclined users may struggle to set up.

In the United States, Tasers are not considered firearms and are legal for civilian use in most states. Some cities, counties and states do restrict — or ban — their use by people who are not police officers. The company will not ship its product outside the United States unless the person placing the order holds a valid import/export permit.

It takes, on average, four minutes to transcribe one minute of audio by hand, according to Rev, other transcription services, and anecdotes shared by transcription professionals. That time commitment paired with the training and experience needed to transcribe accurately makes human-transcribed audio typically cost $1 to $3 per minute of audio. Human transcription gives you the highest-quality results, with experience-honed accuracy and the human intuition required to guess the correct homonym or a less clearly pronounced name.

On Oct. 14, 2007, Robert Dziekanski, 40, of Pieszyce, Poland, died at Vancouver International Airport after being shocked five times with a Taser by RCMP officers.

The CBC News report prompted several provinces — including Quebec, Alberta and Nova Scotia — to test their Tasers and pull some or all off the streets after their own tests showed the weapons failed to work properly.

News reports will often quote the voltage delivered by a Taser — up to 50,000 volts. That sounds like a lot of electricity, but it's a misleading way of expressing the power a Taser uses.

"We don't speak often enough about the number of lives that have been saved, the number of people that are up and walking around today that might not have been had it not been for a Taser," says Steve Palmer, executive director of the Canadian Police Research Centre. The CPRC is a partnership among the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, the RCMP and the National Research Council of Canada.

Taser stands for "Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle." It is named after a series of children's science-fiction novels written in the early 20th century featuring the young genius inventor Tom Swift.

After the release of the first report, the B.C. provincial government said it would act immediately to adopt Braidwood's recommendations.

Alice is a basic AI transcription service built around automation. Finished transcripts are emailed to you and any colleagues you add. Alternatively, the service can save transcripts to Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive; share them on Slack; add them to Trello tasks; or kick off Zapier automations from completed transcripts. It whiffed on a number of names, transcribing “Cameroon” as “Kenmore,” “bobcats” as “bug cats,” and “bag” as “Baghdad,” among other mistakes that we didn’t see in other transcripts. But its built-in search was better than that of competitors, surfacing results across every transcript in your account.

In June 2008, Taser International lost its first civil suit. The company was ordered to pay more than $5 million in damages after a jury in San Jose, Calif., found that shocks from the company's devices contributed 15 per cent to the Feb. 19, 2005, death of Robert Heston, 40. The jury found that Heston's own actions, including toxic methamphetamine ingestion, were 85 per cent responsible for his death.

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Taser International says more than 16,200 law enforcement agencies in more than 40 countries use its devices. Since early 1998, more than 543,000 Taser brand immobilizers have been sold to law enforcement agencies.

AI transcripts were worse at names but still 98.9% accurate. That’s better than all but one of the human-powered transcription services we tested, at a fraction of the time and price.

The jolt stuns the target by causing an uncontrollable contraction of the muscle tissue. The target is immobilized and falls to the ground — regardless of pain tolerance or mental focus.

Today’s smartphones already offer basic transcription features, typically for voicemail or as accessibility features. Google Recorder provides high-quality real-time dictation, and Google’s Gemini can create a text summary of recorded audio on Pixel 8 and 9 series phones.

It’s designed to upload audio and get it transcribed as quickly as possible. You can order transcription in around five clicks, and downloading a completed transcript takes a single click from the notification email. When ordering, you can choose AI or human transcription, then upload an audio file in nearly any popular format (including .mp3 and Apple Voice Recorder’s .m4a format, along with .webm, .ovg, and video files including .mp4 and .wmv)—or paste a link to a Dropbox or Google Drive file, or YouTube or Vimeo video.

Transcription is now a commodity—a default feature in the work-centered apps so many of us use on a daily basis. Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams transcribe meetings. Slack adds transcripts to audio shared in chat. Even YouTube auto-captions videos.

It’s fast. In our tests, GoTranscript AI took 6 minutes to transcribe our entire batch of recordings —less than one minute per minute of audio, which was faster than Reduct and Rev AI, though slower than Vook.ai, OpenAI Whisper, and Descript. But GoTranscript’s human transcripts came back between 58 minutes and 2.5 hours after we placed our order—significantly faster than the anticipated one-day turnaround, similar to Rev’s human transcription, and faster than Transcription Panda (which took 6 hours 30 minutes for similar transcripts with their one-day turnaround service).

Vook.ai is a sparse transcription service, built using custom transcription models based on OpenAI’s Whisper. But it delivers highly accurate transcriptions in minutes.

We’ve updated this guide to correct an error. A previous version of this guide stated that Vook’s time blocks were available in two-hour increments, but they can be customized to any amount of time.

iOS 18, which rolls out to iPhones this fall, is jam-packed with AI-powered features like generative emoji, photo cleanup tools, and ChatGPT integration.

Public concern is growing over the increasing use of Tasers in light of mixed reports on their safety and the lack of details surrounding incidents of Taser deployment by law enforcement agencies. Many of the incident reports released publicly by the RCMP are incomplete, with several key areas left blank.

On the other hand, AI transcription tools today rely on neural network transformer models that recognize words in spoken audio then infer the correct words and punctuation. Similar to the way predictive text on your keyboard recommends the next word, or ChatGPT gives answers, today’s transcription tools are, at a high level, guessing what you’re going to say next.

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Automated transcription services can transcribe in nearly real time. Human transcription services should take no more than one business day—and ideally less.

Getting transcripts is easy and quick. Vook.ai transcribes audio three times as fast as GoTranscript’s AI service. You simply upload recordings from your computer, choose to optionally identify speakers (free) or translate the transcript with DeepL (for double the cost).

In November 2007, the UN Committee Against Torture released a statement saying "use of Taser X26 weapons, provoking extreme pain, constituted a form of torture, and … in certain cases, it could also cause death."

Tasers are hand-held weapons that deliver a jolt of electricity through a pair of wires propelled by compressed air from up to 10.6 metres away.

Taser Amazon

Descript is worth considering for its interface alone if you’re working with a team. And if you’re building transcripts for a podcast, it could be an all-in-one tool to record, edit, and transcribe podcasts as a team.

For turnarounds faster than one day, GoTranscript is more expensive than our previous top pick, Rev. At $2.75 per minute versus Rev’s $1.99 per minute for the same promised turnaround time, you will pay extra for frequent timestamps or less-clear audio. But GoTranscript’s accuracy makes it the service to choose when you need the cleanest transcriptions—and actual turnaround times were faster than promised, as well.

AI has raised the bar for transcription—a notion borne out by the fact that even human transcription is, on average, more accurate today than it was a half-decade ago. Steve Jobs liked to call computers “a bicycle for our minds,” a metaphor I couldn’t shake while testing these services. Today’s human transcription services often use AI for a first-pass before humans clean up the copy, showing one way that humans and AI can work best together.

Nearly every new tech hardware and software update today promises new AI features. With OpenAI Whisper’s open-source model already providing more-accurate transcriptions than most human transcription services offered a few years ago, expect to see future models offer even greater accuracy.

In the same way, OpenAI’s Whisper transcription model is available in code today, or via an API call on OpenAI’s servers. While ChatGPT today only includes dictation used to ask a question, it would seem to be a natural progression to offer audio file transcription directly in ChatGPT’s interface—or to see similar offerings from other LLM chats such as Claude in the near future.

RCMP officers must also give a verbal warning "where tactically feasible" before using their stun guns, according to the new policy.

It doesn’t include speaker tracking or timestamps, which may also make it less attractive for some use cases. But it’s the transcription model to beat today, and we’d be remiss not to mention it.

A low-voltage, high-current circuit would be analogous to a storm sewer. A great deal of water passes through but at low pressure.

The RCMP in May 2010, released new stun gun restrictions, indicating officers are only permitted to use the weapons in cases where a person is causing bodily harm or an officer has "reasonable grounds" to believe a person will "imminently" harm someone.