Happy Scribe – Automate your transcriptions and subtitles

Happy Scribe - Automate your transcriptions and subtitles

I’m all in for automating processes, every manual process I can take and automate, the more time it creates in my every day. Today’s product will show you how you can take a process that can take hours and take it all the way down to minutes. As you know, I do YouTube, I do podcast, and for these two elements, I like to transcribe my text. Some likes to do subtitles I like to transcribe because I use the text in my blog post, today’s product that I have reviewed for you.

Will be doing this for you within minutes, there is a free plan, a paid plan and a pro plan, I’ll go through each of these plans. Today’s product is called Happy Scribe. Happy Scribe has two main features. It can either transcribe text for you, where it basically takes sound and turns it into text. I will dig into how it does it. And then it can also create subtitles for you, for your YouTube channel or whatever you need the subtitles for.

They support more than one hundred and twenty languages, and they are used by the big companies like BBC, Spotify and so much more. So without further ado, let’s dive into Happy Scribe and see what it’s all about.

So let’s move on to the features within Happy Scribe. There are two main features, whereas within these two main features there are three plans. So the two main features, as mentioned in the introduction, is transcribing and subtitles.

Within these there are three plans. The free plan, which is the first plan, is basically where you manually edit everything yourself. This means that you will upload a file, but only to listen to it yourself. You will have it in your ears running while you manually type down every word that you hear. This doesn’t solve the problem mentioned in the introduction. The problem is that we want to automate a manual process and this keeps it a manual process.

In order to automate this process, you need to go up on the paid plan and believe me, it is worth it. In the free plan, as mentioned, you need to type everything down. The cool thing is, and this is common for all the plans, you can share the document with your potential client or whoever you’re doing the work for. Of course, if you’re doing the work yourself, there’s no need in sharing. But this is a cool feature if you’re working with clients because you can upload the file, write everything in and then send it off to the client.

And then you can choose whether the client should be able to only read it or edit it. And this you can do for all the three plans. Now, the paid plan is where you really get value for the money in the paid plan. You can upload your file and Happy Scribe will transcribe or make subtitles based on what you have chosen your entire file automatically for you. However, when this is done, you will get an email and you have to go through it yourself.

This is a fast process and it often takes very, very few minutes to do. However, in the beginning, it will take longer time. The reason why is if you use keywords or company names that Happy Scribe doesn’t know, it will try to transcribe it for you, but often it will not be able to do. What your job is here is to help Happy Scribe learn these words. And how you do it is that you basically edit the text and then you highlight it and added to your vocabulary.

This means that the next time Happy Scribe needs to translate this word, it will know the word because it’s added to your vocabulary. And this way you train Happy Scribe. And in the end, hopefully you will be able to automate your entire process within transcribing or making subtitles. I have done this from the beginning and it’s starting to pay off with me. I use less and less time editing and it makes me trust the product so much more.

The last plan is their professional plan in the professional plan, you choose basically to do the same as the paid plan. It’s just another human being doing it. So the difference is only that the human being doing this has this as a profession because that person will do exactly the same as I just explained. That person will upload the file, go through the entire text, proofread it and make sure it’s correct. What’s cool about Happy Scribe is that when you have uploaded your file, it will divide your sound into different sections and even with punctuation and commas, often it’s not so precise, but it’s a good indication for you in order to make sure that the text overall is correct.

Now, I’ll try to explain to you how this actually works, how it’s possible to upload a file and then get text in return. And this is Happy Scribe’s AI algorithm. Happy Scribe uses an AI model that they have developed. And so far it is with 85 percent accuracy. The way it works is that when you upload a file their AI model will take this file and divide it into small sections. And by sections I mean small sound waves like we know it from music and everywhere.

These small sound waves, it will try to convert into words. So you can imagine that it gets an entire file and then it will divide it into where it thinks that each section ends. Then it will take each section and divide that section into words and then each word it will subtract and write. And that’s how it converts the entire audio file into text. The last thing I want to dive into is integrations. This is the last step in order to automate your processes.

An integration is fantastic. They have, of course, the Zapier integration that we all know. One cool thing for me is that they have an RSS feed integration. This means that I can automate it to say that every time I upload a podcast or a YouTube episode, then I can tell it in the RSS feed to automatically pull that and start transcribing it. It’s fantastic and it’s automating even more. I don’t have to manually go in and upload the file.

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    Another fantastic integration is to YouTube. If I want to manually do it, I don’t have to find the sound file or the humongous video file and upload it to have described. I can make an integration and then basically just click on the YouTube video that I want to transcribe or make subtitles to. In the future they are working on that you can make YouTube subtitles as an automation completely. This means that by one click you can get subtitles into one of their more than one hundred and twenty languages.

    In the future, they are working on a lot more different integrations, and one, I’m personally very excited for is Final Cut Pro. I use Final Cut Pro to edit this video, for instance, and it would be so cool if I, within the same programme, could stay in there and then transcribe my entire file. But let’s see what’s in for the future. So I’ve been using Happy Scribe for a lot of months now, so I have my opinion on their editor because everything around it works seamlessly well, and that’s great.

    They have a folder structure that you can use, and they also have workspaces. But I don’t use that because I only use Happy Scribe for my own need. Of course, if I was working with clients, I would make a workspace for each client. The editor where I work the most in is what I want to give my opinion on. The design overall is great. A lot of stuff in there is awesome. It’s so, so great. There is one bug though, when I’m trying to edit the text that the sound is telling me right now, then it will autoplay the sound and it will do it over and over again.

    And this is a very irritating moment because you have to imagine that the sound just keep on going while you try to edit the word behind you, and that’s not so well. So I hope they will fix that in the future. Maybe when they see this video, they will fix it. Let’s hope, because it’s a very irritating moment. But except for that, their editor is great it has shortcuts that makes it possible for you to work extremely fast.

    I almost never use the mouse within their editor if it wasn’t for the bug just mentioned. So I hope they will keep on improving this editor and make it work better because so far is great and it never lags in the sound or anything. Happy Scribe’s pricing structure works in the way that you pay 0.20 US dollars per word. Their competitors does it in another way, Otter.ai is their closest competitor, and they give you a monthly fee that you pay and then you have an amount of minutes.

    For me, Happy Scribe’s pricing structure works the best because I don’t use that many minutes, so I don’t have to pay that much as if I was using otter.ai but you have to keep this in mind that if you are using a lot of minutes, maybe it makes more sense for you to use another product. But Happy Scribe is a great product and I’m so happy that I’m using it.

    So competitors Otter.ai is the closest competitor and they are very, very similar.

    I would say Otter.ai has some years in advance in their development and you can see that they are more refined and their technology is more refined and more accurate, but Happy Scribe is really coming after them. And when you take a look at their feedback that they use from all of their users, they are moving at a high speed. And that’s fantastic, because that’s another thing that they do. They listen so much to us, users that uses Happy Scribe.

    Within their tool, they have a menu point only for giving feedback and where you can also see what they are working on so you can give your input on what you think, in what direction they should go, and you can vote up and down whatever it is you want to have in Happy Scribe. So just to sum everything up, Happy Scribe is fantastic at transcribing and using it for subtitles if you want to use it for YouTube or other videos, it’s accurate up to eighty-five percent and you can make it accurate up to one hundred percent if you train it.

    Remember to use this vocabulary. It’s fantastic and it’s such a great way to see that Happy Scribe just becomes better and better and their support is great. I always get an answer within the same day or if I write in the evening, of course I get the answer the next day. You can’t expect anything else, but the support is great. They listen, and they really help me every time I have an issue.

    So that’s it for this video. If you like Happy Scribe or you would like to try it out. Remember, they have a free trial that you can use and if you have any questions, please leave them in the comment. Or if you have any products you want me to review, leave them in the comments.

    And if you’d like the video remember to give it a thumbs up and until next time, let’s catch up on the next one.

    Posted by
    Phillip Stemann

    I have been in the software industry for 10+ years, and I’ve gathered a ton of experience I’m sharing with you. I test out tools each week and share my findings with you, for you to easily choose the right software for your needs. I have so far reviews many types of software and even built software myself, it’s a huge passion for me.