Can an agent do transcription?
Yes. Transcription is solved to a standard that beats most human transcribers on speed and matches them on accuracy for clear audio, at a fraction of a cent per minute.
- Hours back per week
- 3
- Human cost
- €0.80–2.00 per audio minute
- Agent cost
- Fractions of a cent per minute
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Transcribe clear audio
YESNear-perfect, across accents, in most languages.
Identify speakers
YESReliable except in heavy cross-talk.
Clean up the transcript
YESRemoves filler and false starts while keeping meaning.
Timestamp and index
YESMakes hours of recordings searchable.
Handle poor audio
MOSTLYBetter than a human on noise, worse on guessing from context. It marks uncertainty if told to.
- Yours
Certified or verbatim legal transcript
NOT YETCertification requires an accountable human transcriber.
4/5 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- Certified transcripts
- Recording consent
- Anything where an exact word matters legally
How this goes wrong
Silent guessing over inaudible speech. A transcript that reads smoothly through a passage nobody could actually hear is worse than one marked [inaudible].
What it needs access to
- Audio and video files
- Storage
- Search index
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my transcription agent. Transcribe the file with speaker labels and timestamps every 30 seconds. Mark anything you cannot hear clearly as [inaudible] rather than guessing — a smooth transcript with an invented phrase in it is worse than an honest gap. Produce two versions: a clean read with filler removed, and a full verbatim version. For any name, acronym or technical term you are unsure of, flag it in a list at the end with the timestamp. Do not summarise unless I ask.
Questions people ask
Is it accurate enough for professional use?
For clear recordings, yes. For legal or medical records where a single word carries consequence, use it as a first pass with a human checking against the audio.
Want this one actually running?
The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to Audio and video files and Storage, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.
Set up a transcription agentThis site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.