What are the prices of transcription tools for Zoom meetings and webinars?

What Are the Prices of Transcription Tools for Zoom Meetings and Webinars?

A good transcript of your Zoom meeting can really help to boost engagement levels among your participants. It's also a great way to make your webinars more socially inclusive. If you are new to audio and video transcription tools, you’ll probably want to check out how much Zoom transcription tools cost before you sign up. After all, you don’t want to overpay or end up with a substandard service. Here’s all you need to know about the prices of transcription tools for Zoom.

How Much Does Zoom Transcription Cost?

The exact cost of your Zoom video transcript will depend on several factors, including the duration of your conferencing call or webinar, the service that you sign up with and its billing method, plus, perhaps most importantly, whether you opt for human or machine-generated audio transcripts.

To give you a better idea of how much you should pay for your Zoom video transcript, let’s take a look at some average price ranges for both types of transcription services. We’ll then move on to look at specific companies and their different price plans.

Machine-Generated Zoom Transcripts

Machine-generated transcription tools use specialised transcription software to convert your audio files into text. They are generally very fast, making them suitable for live transcription and on screen captions.

Automatic transcriptions tend to have accuracy rates of around 80-85% on average, depending on the clarity of your recording and any specialised vocabulary or strong accents. The average price for automatic Zoom captions is approximately $0.25 per audio minute (approximately £0.20), although you find some tools that are slightly higher or lower.

If you have a lot of recordings to transcribe, you may prefer to opt for a monthly subscription plan. Monthly automatic transcription plans tend to be priced anywhere between $8-$30 (approximately £7.40-£24.50) depending on how many minutes you wish to transcribe, as well as extra features such as custom vocabulary.

Human-Generated Zoom Transcripts

Like automatic transcription services, human-generated transcripts also have their advantages and disadvantages. Firstly, they are highly accurate, often rated at 99%. Of course, such high accuracy levels are dependent upon a clear video recording.

On the downside, while a human-generated transcription file will not need any editing, it will, understandably, cost considerably more than using software versions. As real humans are actually typing out your Zoom webinar content, it can also take quite a bit of time. You’ll typically have to wait a few hours, or possibly a day or two, for your transcript text file.

Prices for human-generated webinar transcriptions tend to come in at around $1.50-$3 per minute (approximately £1.20-£2.45). Most companies will charge extra for a fast turnaround or for other special features like transcription content translation.

What’s Best Human or Machine Zoom Transcription?

If you’re unsure which type of service to go for, here’s our advice:

Use human-made services if you need high quality levels and you don’t need instant live captioning for your team. For example, if you have a recording of a webinar or want to document a conferencing call for legal purposes that you have already stored in the cloud.

Software services are best if you want almost instant transcripts and high levels of accuracy are not essential. You may also want to choose software generated transcripts if you have a lot of meetings to transcribe. If you have the time to check over your transcript content yourself and are willing to make some small edits, you could save yourself some cash.

Average Prices of Popular Zoom Transcription Tools

There are plenty of offers for Zoom meeting transcription services. Many companies offer a free trial, for example, so you can get to grips with using their product and check out how accurate it really is and whether it's a good fit for your team.

Here are some of the average prices for transcribing your Zoom live meetings and recordings, correct at the time of writing.

Zoom Live Transcription

If you’re on a tight budget and accuracy isn’t a must, Zoom’s native Live Transcription service makes a good place to get started. While it has its fair share of drawbacks, including no speaker recognition, punctuation, capitalization or breakout rooms support, it is fairly easy to add with just a click on your host menu.

Record your meeting to the cloud and you can download an automatic transcript of your audio. Zoom Live Transcription is free to use, although you may need to spend a fair amount of time reviewing your transcription files to improve the quality and reliability of your text file.

Happy Scribe

Happy Scribe is one of the very few providers that offer both automatic and machine-generated transcripts and they are currently offering a free trial offer on their automatic service. Their high accuracy levels make this company a good choice for transcribing both meetings and webinars alike.

Machine-generated transcripts are priced at €0.20 per minute (around £0.18) on a pay-as-you-go plan, so you’ll only ever pay for what you need. Human-generated audio transcripts cost €2.00 per audio minute (around £1.70), with human transcription translations for subtitles priced at €5.50 per audio minute recording (around £4.80).

Grain - Monthly Subscription

Grain provides an AI automated note taking service that can be used to transcribe your business meetings complete with Zoom and Microsoft Team integrations.

Grain currently offers a one-off free starter period, followed by a monthly subscription plan that costs €14 per month (approximately £12.30). There is also an enterprise account for business pro packages with a custom price structure.

Otter - Annual Billed Subscription

Another popular automatic transcription service, Otter is designed primarily for business meetings. Its machine-generated service provides real time audio transcription and automated notes.

Otter has a basic account plan to get you started. While it is free, it can only be used for meetings that last up to 30 minutes, with 300 minutes maximum per month. Subscribe to a Pro account or Business monthly plans which work out at $8.33 USD and $20 USD (around £6.80 and £16.30) per month to unlock extra features. Note that both plans are billed annually.

Summary

There are quite a lot of differences to consider when choosing a transcription tool for your Zoom meetings and webinars. If you are happy to spend a lot of time editing or if accuracy isn’t that important, check out the native Zoom Live Transcription. Otherwise, expect to pay around $8-$15 (approximately £6.50 - £12.20) per month for a basic subscription plan. Alternatively, use Happy Scribe’s pay-as-you-go automated service and pay per transcript with no subscription fees. For the highest quality transcripts, expect to pay around $2 per audio minute (approximately £1.60) for Happy Scribe’s human-generated transcription services.