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“Can’t we just use Whisper to do all our transcribing?”
It’s a question we hear a lot. And it makes sense given Whisper is an easily accessible Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model and transcription tool.
And the honest answer is: it depends on what you’re trying to achieve.
Whisper is no doubt attractive for making transcription more cost effective vs a ready-made SaaS (Software as a Service) solution. At Trint, we’ve come across organizations with remits to quickly scale up internal AI projects. So tapping into open-source software offers them a very efficient and accessible way to innovate with AI.
For example, when it comes to simply taking a recorded interview, meeting or call and transcribing, there’s no doubt building your own tool with Whisper has you covered. It’s quick, supports over 50 languages, and you can search your transcript afterwards.
So the advantages to transcription are clear.
However, from speaking with more than 350 customer organizations globally, we’ve noticed that the more intricate and valuable their requirements, the less Whisper is capable of meeting their needs.
This is where we begin to see Whisper’s limitations. If you’re on location needing to capture a press conference or a politician’s speech, or even meeting someone on a train, building your own transcription tool with Whisper cannot help because there’s currently no support for mobile devices.
So that means you’ll have to record the event, and then head back to the office or home to transcribe the file. However, now that solutions like Trint offer live transcription on mobile in more than 40 languages, and even automatically detect the language being spoken, it seems taking the Whisper route is wholly inefficient. Especially when the pressure’s on to rapidly turn transcriptions into content.
While Whisper is a strong option for transcribing recorded files in over 50 languages, keep in mind that - at the time of this blog - utilizing Whisper allows you only to translate from another language into English. So if you have an English transcript that you want to translate into say Spanish, that currently is not possible when you build your own tool with Whisper.
One of the many reasons global organizations use Trint is the fact that they can not only transcribe in 40+ languages, but they can instantly translate those transcripts into over 50 languages. Helping them tailor content for a global audience in minutes!
Something we firmly believe in - which all of our customers say as well - is that having a transcript by itself isn’t enough. The real value is quickly and easily being able to do something with it. Such as creating a paper cut of a story, editing a podcast or collaborating with team mates.
With Whisper, you’re plugging into an API to transcribe a file, which it does very well, but that’s about it. If you then want to edit, bring colleagues in to collaborate, or start building out an article or story, you have to go through the whole rigmarole of sending it to a separate app or program, adding colleagues, adding speaker names, editing and so forth. A far from ideal user experience! With Trint, it’s all in one platform, making it much easier for users to work smarter and faster, and avoid getting lost in a deluge of browser tabs!
Although the open-source nature of Whisper definitely makes it easy to access and cheaper to build your own transcription tool, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Ultimately, it’s an open-source software that puts the burden on your technical teams to: build a user friendly interface (otherwise let’s be honest; no layperson would touch it); offer constant technical support to users; run frequent patch updates (because after all, open source requires regular monitoring!). And if that’s not enough, there’s no one helping you to make the most of everything or take on the hassle for you.
This drain on resources of course comes at a cost. Is your organization prepared to take on this hidden cost? Many of our customers realized this and preferred to work with Trint because we minimize the administrative burden for technical teams. We’ll handle 24-hour technical support, the patch updates, everything. You’ll even have a dedicated Customer Success partner holding your hand every step of the way to make deployment and adoption easier.
Whisper doesn’t show any major red flags when it comes to information security and data privacy. For example, they are SOC 2 Type II certified that is similar to Trint’s own ISO 27001 certification.
The only thought to keep in mind is that all data is transferred to their US servers, which might be a concern for EU-based organizations who want to keep their data in the EU. Many newsrooms, corporations and universities work with Trint for this very reason.
