Better English (US) transcription
closed
Matt Marquart
The transcription function is pretty frustratingly inaccurate, especially when there's ElevenLabs Speech-to-text and OpenAI Whisper that do transcription so much better. Is there an option where we choose different models for transcription (even using our own API keys from those platforms)?
My use can is transcribing long-form meetings, and the descript tool is the best for editing those meetings for clarity (snipping out tangents and removing filler words), but I'll find that I'll then need to export the audio file, and then take it to something like ElevenLabs for a more accurate transcription.
Thank you for your consideration.
M
Marketing Team
closed
M
Marketing Team
provide feedback
P
PM Team at Descript
Hello Matt.
I'm sorry that you're having issues with the transcriptions that Descript is generating. The team has been making a number of changes to improve the transcription experience in the last few months, with plenty more to come.
One of the new features we recently introduced is the option to change your Transcription Provider in the General Settings tab of your Descript account. By default, you should be on Automatic, which would use "Scholar", which we've determined is the best provider in most cases for most people. You can also try "Daredevil" (which is Whisper under the hood). We've seen Whisper is far more prone to hallucinations in broad testing, and a slightly lower overall word error rate, despite being faster and slightly better at proper nouns.
We're working to add new models over time, so if you want what Descript thinks is generally the best you can set to automatic, and we'll keep you on our recommended provider. But you may find that one of the others works better for your specific content and want to stick with them.
Aside from the providers themselves, we continue to invest our own logic to improve the transcriptions and transcript editing experience.
Thank you for the feedback!
Matt Marquart
PM Team at Descript Thank you. I’ll try out Scholar. I hadn’t seen that in General Settings and will check it out asap.