Round-ups

Is Apple’s new free AI-powered transcription feature a game-changer for journalists? We compared it to paid services

October 28, 2024November 8, 2024 by Marian Siljeholm

If you’re an iPhone user who doesn’t delay updates until your phone is on the brink of breakdown, you may have noticed something new in your Notes app. The iOS 18.1 operating system, which hit our pockets this week, included a new feature for phone calls and the Voice Memo and Notes apps that take talk-to-text to a new level — allowing users to record and transcribe entire audio interviews on both mobile and desktop. The new abilities also represent Apple’s foray into a new area: the transcriptions are accompanied by an AI-generated summary on newer phones.

Sounds amazing, right? We’re as excited as any journalist who never wants to hand transcribe another interview could be, but we’d be doing the profession a disservice if we didn’t ask questions, obviously.

First up, it only works on desktop models running the latest version of the Sequoia system software and the AI features can only be used on iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max and the entire iPhone 16 series. In addition, according to Apple, “audio transcription is available only in English for the variants of Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, UK, and US.” We called to clarify, and the rep couldn’t point to any specific list of supported languages, saying only that, “supported languages will automatically transcribe.” So, I guess you just have to give it a whirl to see if it’ll support your language needs.

Language functionality aside, this is exciting news, especially when you consider that other top speech-to-audio transcription services, Trint for instance, can run users as much as $50 per seat per month, and that’s just for the basic package. So, could this new free software be the game changer we hope it is? We wanted to see for ourselves, so we put Apple’s new functionality to the test against some of the top paid services being used by journalists today, namely, Otter, Zoom, Trint, and Sonix. We ran an audio interview through all of them and compared the output to a cleaned-up version to see who got what right.

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We found that, as much as we hate to say it, you do get what you pay for. But that’s not to say that the new Apple transcription feature isn’t something to celebrate. At the end of the day, it comes down to needs, if you’re looking for a simple transcription service to serve as a backup to informal interviews conducted in low-stakes environments without much background noise – Apple has your back. But if you’re looking to transcribe during a meeting or interview with numerous voices and/or in an environment with lots of background audio, or to convert your interview from an existing video or other media file, you may want to consider one the pricier competitors.