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Dropped $400 on an AI transcription tool for my dad's old cassette tapes, and now I can't decide if it was genius or a waste
So my dad has like 30 old cassettes from the 80s of him and his band messing around in a garage in Akron, and I wanted to get them into text so I could actually read the stories he tells between songs. I paid $400 for a year of this AI transcription service that claims it handles noisy audio and multiple speakers. Half the time it nails stuff, like it got my uncle's name right and even picked up my dad saying 'turn the bass down, Ron' which cracked me up. But the other half it turns guitar feedback into fake words and labels my mom as 'unknown speaker 4' when she's clearly the one laughing in the background. I've spent maybe 20 hours cleaning up the transcripts and I'm not even through tape 6 yet. My brother thinks I'm nuts and should have just paid a local guy $15 an hour to type it out. But honestly the AI catches little things I would miss, like when my dad mumbles a song title I never knew. Is it worth $400 for something that's 70% right, or should I have just paid a person? Anyone else tried AI on old family recordings and did it actually work out?
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nora_dixon27d ago
Man, I did the same thing with my grandma's reel to reel tapes from her church choir days and yeah, the cleanup work is real. The tool kept writing "amen" as "a man" and turned the organ into something about a horse, but it also caught her humming a hymn I'd never heard her do before. I stopped trying to fix every last word and just started skimming for the good parts, because a person would've cost me way more than $400 for that many hours of tape.
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