Podcast with Oli Habryka on LessWrong / Lightcone Infrastructure

I used a service with an OpenAI Whisper backend as a first pass (specifically, revolvdiv this time), then manually transcribed everything, discovered that leaving all the speech filler words in made the transcript very hard to read, and did another editing pass.

I agree that, if I do this again in the future, rev.com would be a relevant choice.

Anyway, ultimately the hard part was not mainly turning audio into text, but doing so at a (self-inflicted, probably unreasonably) high standard of accuracy. No, even that's not quite right. The problem is that you want high accuracy (so you don't put words into someone's mouth), but not regarding the literal spoken words (which are full of filler, and word repetitions, and unintelligible mumbling, and sentences that don't have correct grammar - all because people don't speak like they write), but rather the meaning the speakers wanted to convey.

But also, this is the kind of thing at which one gets much better with experience, which I lacked.

Concretely, I guess it would cost me ~$270 plus 2-4 hours of my time.

Yes, that's the article I meant. I understand the tradeoff you're making, and given the costs you cite, I can totally see that that's not worthwhile for you, especially if higher quality trades off against higher quantity.

That said, I've mailed the Clearer Thinking podcast team to ask about more details regarding their current transcription workflow (which is currently a combination of automatic transcription via Otter.ai, followed by a hired human transcriptionist, to minimize required staff time), and will post any responses I get.

Alternatively, if someone offered to pay me $200, or $40 per hour I actually needed (whichever is lower), I'd produce the transcript myself. (As a general matter of economic arbitrage, nobody who's being paid California salaries should spend their own time to produce transcripts themselves.)