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Hot take: my $300 AI transcription tool was a total waste until I changed one thing
I threw down $300 on a year of an AI transcription service last spring for my podcast and client interviews, and for the first few months it kept mangling names and technical terms so bad I was spending an hour fixing each file by hand, which is more time than just typing it out myself. I almost canceled it twice and told my wife it was a dumb purchase. Then a friend in Austin who does the same work said to stop pre-recording everything clean and instead record with a cheap $25 lapel mic plus drop a 30 second glossary of my recurring terms into the app before each upload. That one tweak took my accuracy from maybe 80% to what feels like 97%, and now a 45 minute interview takes me about 5 minutes to clean up instead of 60. So I'm not sure if the tool was bad or if I was just using it wrong, but I want to know: has anyone else found that a small workflow change saved an AI tool they were about to quit on?
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charlier341mo ago
My buddy Dave in Portland told me the same thing about the glossary trick and I blew him off for weeks because it sounded too simple. I run a small transcription setup for legal depositions and was getting maybe 82% accuracy on names and case terms, which meant I was basically re-listening to every recording anyway. The thing that finally clicked was making a template file with all the judge names, street names, and expert witness terms we see over and over, then pasting it into the tool before every upload. Cut my cleanup time from about 40 minutes per file down to 8 or 10. The mic part matters too, since my old setup picked up so much room noise the software was guessing at half the words. You were not using it wrong, you just had to feed it the right info up front, and most of these tools never tell you that.
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