Amazon continues their release of new products and services in the AWS realm. Recently they added a few more including a transcription service. Amazon Transcribe is a service like Chime where they are doing a great job of undercutting the competition in price. There is a free tier option of one hour per month free for the first twelve months. However, once the free tier is up, the normal price runs around $1.00 per forty-five minutes of audio transcribed.
The Value of Text
Whether you have audio, like a podcast, or video (a tutorial, ad, or vlog) that has been created for the Internet, there is one key challenge. That is making the audio or video searchable. Transcription services are an excellent way to achieve this. Likewise, many have been able to do so at a relatively low cost. This service gets the cost down to where it is feasible even for regular productions like a podcast when you consider the price per minute of content.
Not Drag and Drop
The easiest way to use the service is through the console. You upload an audio file to S3 and kick off a transcribe job. In my testing, you can get results back in minutes. As with any AWS service, there are a number of API options available as well. The examples provided make it relatively easy for someone with a little technical know-how to load audio files into an S3 storage bucket and get them transcribed.
