GUYS. Mind-blown. I just recorded a little over 100 minutes of my next non-fiction book, uploaded it on the free trial of otter.ai and I got the transcription back in five minutes.
Initially, I had taken a walk for maybe an hour and a half and used a digital recorder from my memoir ghostwriting days. Only drawback was that my neighbors kind of gave me a funny smile because I was talking to myself. When I basically finished my book, I went home to google what I could do with the recordings. I’d kind of looked into Dragon before, but had been put off by having to train it, plus of course having to get the software itself. Otter gave me a free trial where I could upload three recordings.
Poking around on the site, otter is $100 for a year subscription or $12 per month. An online transcription service with a 12 hour turnaround (not bad, but a wait, still) would have cost me 1.25 per minute. So $125. Had I done it myself (which I used to do, so I know how tedious that can be), it would have taken a long, long time. So in essence, I got my first draft done of this book under two hours. The transcription is super clean too; I could see some rough spots but not much. And it is completely searchable by the time stamp. I ended up exporting it on my clipboard and into Word without time stamps, in one long monologue, but it should be easy enough to divide up the sections.
The partial transcription clocks in at 8,876 words. Let’s see…on a good day I can type 1200 words per hour if I really focus. I basically “wrote” 5,917 words per hour.
My neighbors had better get used to me talking to myself. And, I have a five hour drive coming up where I can dictate a book. Eep! So many possibilities!
If you do decide to get otter, I would appreciate your using this referral link, but otherwise, they are not paying me to say any of this good stuff!
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