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Switched from manual transcription to an AI tool for my podcast interviews and saved 5 hours a week

For the last two years I was transcribing all my 45 minute interviews by hand using a foot pedal and text editor. Took me about 6 hours per episode. Finally tried Descript last month after a buddy kept bugging me about it. Now I just drop the audio in and it spits out a draft in 10 minutes. I still have to clean up some speaker labels and weird phrasing but it cut my editing time down to about an hour. Anyone else find a specific AI tool that actually made a dent in their workload instead of just adding more steps?

3 comments

3 Comments

rowan_thomas841mo ago

My foot pedal and I are in a weird awkward relationship now.

bennett.evan1mo ago

Have you checked how much of that saved time you're actually spending on training yourself to trust the AI output? lol I found that with Otter.ai I was still re-listening to huge chunks of the interview just to catch mistakes and it kind of ate into the savings. Took me a solid month before I stopped double checking every single line. The real game changer for me was realizing I could just fix the parts that mattered for the final edit and let the rest be a little sloppy. That mental shift saved way more time than the tool itself honestly.

jennifer8331mo ago

A solid MONTH of double-checking? Wow. That sounds brutal. I honestly don't have that kind of patience. I probably would have given up after the first week. But your point about just fixing the parts that actually matter is smart. I think I've been too obsessed with perfection on the little stuff. Gonna try that mental shift thing you mentioned. Might save my sanity.