Review of Descript – A Transcription App for Mac

If you’ve ever tried to transcribe audio from a video or podcast, you might love this app that’s been released this week. Descript is

…powered by Google Speech, which means you get state-of-the-art transcription accuracy. Audio is synced to text, so you can always hear the sound beneath the words – and search audio by searching text. If you need the perfection that only human-powered transcription can provide, upgrade to White Glove for 24 hour turnaround, just $1 per minute of audio.

The proof for anything app like this is actually using it. How good is the transcription? How much editing do you have to do after it’s “done”?

🚨 If you want to check out Descript, use this link to sign up for free and we’ll both get an extra 100 minutes of transcriptions added to our accounts. Pretty sweet. 🚨

I decided to take Descript for a test drive on a recent episode of my solo podcast, Daily(ish) #226. A solo podcast is a pretty easy first attempt because there’s only one voice to worry about transcribing. Next time maybe I’ll try a 5 person recording of The U2 Fan podcast.

Watch the Video

Direct link to video

How Much Does Descript Cost?

Descript has two plans – $0.15USD/minute with no monthly fee or $0.07USD/minute with a $20USD/month fee (currently $10USD/month for early adopters). So for my 10 minute long episodes, that works out to $1.50 per episode or $0.70/episode. A regular podcast in the 45 minute range would cost $6.75 / $3.15.

So if you’re doing a lot of transcribing, it wouldn’t take much for the monthly plan to pay for itself.

Does Descript Work?

After testing Descript out, I can say that if you’re wanting to roll your own transcriptions of podcasts or videos, it’s the best app I’ve tried for transcribing. No matter how good the automated portion of the transcription is, you’re going to have to go through and edit to make sure it got any weird words or pauses. The Wordbar feature is something I didn’t really try out in the demo, but it allows you to visually remove silence and gaps in a recording – something that isn’t difficult in a regular audio editor either, but for non-audio geeks makes it that much easier to edit your podcast.

The web publishing and collaboration portion of Descript is something I haven’t experimented with yet – but I will on a future podcast. It allows you to publish your podcast to a special URL and let’s friends/colleagues help fix the transcription and send back notes on the edit – like Google Docs/Word review comments.

Will I Use Descript?

I’ll definitely be trying Descript out on a few projects for clients in the next month or so and evaluating how it might be incorporated into my production workflow. I’d suggest giving it a try by signing up and downloading Descript for free. Be sure to come back and post a link in the comments below to a sample of your podcast/video project with the transcription done by Descript.