I used TurboScribe.ai to automatically transcribe the press conference held by Cebu Archbishop Jose S. Palma Tuesday and was surprised at the high degree of accuracy in its Bisaya transcription.

In several minutes when Archdiocesan media liaison officer Monsignor Joseph Tan spoke in Cebuano, TurboScribe was about 97 percent accurate. That was more than good enough as a basis for writing the story.

It’s not perfect as there are smattering of errors throughout the transcription of the close to two hours of Facebook Live video such as “Moshe Marnell” for “Monsignor Marnell” but it was highly accurate and it saved me a lot of time writing the story. (My story will be out soon, it’s still being processed).

The transcription I got was a marked improvement in its accuracy and utility because TurboScribe did not try to automatically translate the Bisaya quotes. I don’t know if anything or what changed but it used to do that and I find it annoying and unusable.

TurboScribe uses OpenAI’s Whisper API in its transcription. There are various ways of using Whisper API and TurboScribe is the simplest and most straightforward. It is among the few services I actually pay for because I find it very useful in my work.

TurboScribe offers three free transcriptions of up to 30 minutes each every day. The free allotment renews at midnight and a young journalist told me she uses it regularly and would look forward to the 3 free slots opening up.

I pay for a premium account and get unlimited transcriptions daily of up to 10 hours each, imagine that.

The other workflow I use that taps Whisper API is this Voice Notes to Notion jerry-rigged setup that requires you to stitch various online services together. The advantage with this setup is it does not just provide a full transcription but also a summary, key points, and action items.

I would interview people and by the time I am in the car, not only do I have the transcription but a summary of the key points that I can compare to with my handwritten notes.

The setup works on mostly free services but you need to pay for OpenAI API use – which is so much cheaper than TurboScribe. But sometimes it gets wonky so I rely more on TurboScribe. Curiously, its transcription of the same segment in the presscon that TurboScribe got almost totally right contained more errors that indicated the system tried to translate it into Filipino.