How accurate are video transcriptions, the accuracy will depend on a similar set of factors (low quality audio, complex content or more advanced tools). During ideal conditions such as when the audio is clear, and the speaker's voice is discernible; an automated transcription software can provide accuracy rates of 85–90%. However, speak-to-text accuracy plummets in noisy environments, with more than one speaker, or when speakers have heavy accents or use technical terms. In these types of cases where accuracy starts falling lower than 80%, it is better to manually edit those areas in order for the errors to be corrected.
The choice of speech recognition technology in transcription tools is one of the important elements that affects accuracy. While more advanced software will also recognize speakers and punctuation, and can even account for background noise, it is not as trustworthy in some cases compared to human transcription. For instance, while a talking-head video might have some issues with noise cancelling features — particularly if it looks noisy, or the speech is overlapped; a bespoke industry jargon-filled video can be also testing to AI due to higher recognition error rates.
For example the automatic captioning done by YouTube has gotten better over time, it often needs corrections. For instance, YouTube said in 2020 that its automated captions were accurate for simple and clear videos except for categories like more complex (science) where 99% accuracy suffices only after significant human correction. Automated tools can achieve an accuracy rate of 85-90% and sometimes a bit more but professional transcribers are able to reach a rate as high as 98-99%, primarily in the case of good quality audio files.
Another problem for AI transcription is understanding the context behind a word. Though good at transcribing individual words, the software often lacks context and makes errors in phrasing and word choice. This is particularly the case with homophones — words that sound alike but have different meanings where human transcribers are far better at choosing the right word depending on context.
Automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency… Bill Gates Using automated transcription tools can cut down drastically on the time; but nothing will grant as much accuracy as doing a careful read through by human eye.
For those who want accurate, fast transcription of transcribe video to text, the best method is probably using an automated transcription for rough cuts and then polishing them with some human-powered services like the ones I have briefly detailed in this article.