10 Best Descript Alternatives for Accurate AI Transcription in 2024

Descript is a renowned name in the transcription industry and is a decent online editing tool for quick edits on the go.

However, while the Descript suite is a good way to enhance the quality of your video content, it has some issues like subpar accuracy, outdated transcription software, lack of language support, and more.

These disadvantages are significant and have encouraged Descript users to switch to other quality alternatives on the market.

Today, we’ve created a list of the top Descript alternatives, along with in-depth reviews of their benefits, pricing structure, and more. We’ll be comparing the top ten alternatives based on a number of factors, such as accuracy, pricing, language support, UI, and more.

Let’s discover the best Descript alternatives out there.

Key Takeaways

• Descript is a popular transcription and video editing service that utilizes artificial intelligence to create transcriptions of audio.
• Descript has some issues, with accuracy and security problems being at the forefront, along with limited supported languages and more.
• Sonix is a top competitor in the world of AI transcription, boasting 99% accuracy rates, enterprise-grade security, 40+ supported languages, fair pricing, and advanced AI analysis features that make it suitable for a range of transcription, subtitling, and translation needs.

What is Descript?

Descript is an advanced tool that allows users to work closely with video and audio files. The tool is packed with useful editing features that can allow you to streamline the production process of your video content. 

It has features like Overdub that can fix verbal mistakes, AI to remove filler words, fix eye contact, edit backgrounds, and a lot more. With a set of tools ideal for podcasting, screen recording, and transcription, Descript has quickly become a leading service.

The transcriptions from Descript are usable, but there’s some room for improvement. The transcripts are accurate (up to 90%), but there are certain factors that will severely affect that accuracy.

Why You Should Look for a Descript Alternative

There are a few problems that customers have frequently reported about Descript’s transcription tool.

Lack of Focus on Transcription

Descript is a good video editing tool. In fact, its AI tools have set an industry standard for what consumers expect from a combination of modern video editing and AI technology. However, their lack of focus on the transcription side is apparent. It’s clear that transcription isn’t their main selling point.

According to some users, Descript’s transcription software doesn’t learn from its past mistakes,. As a result, users often have to go back to transcripts to fix the same errors repeatedly.

On top of that, Descript isn’t capable of processing crosstalk. If you have a conversation where people are talking over each other, the tool will have difficulty sorting sentences to their respective speakers and will often end up blending two sentences awkwardly.

Subpar Transcription Accuracy

With Descript, you’ll be able to generate transcriptions with up to 90% accuracy. While that’s a respectable figure in the transcription world, there are more accurate alternatives to Descript, with Sonix being one of them (boasting a 99% accuracy rate for AI transcriptions). 

Mediocre Security

Descript has impressive security features like SOC 2 compliance, Auth0, and data encryption. However, the list of security features is not nearly as comprehensive as you can expect from tools like Sonix.

Supported Languages

Descript currently offers support for over 23 languages, exceeding the capabilities of certain competitors yet notably falling short of the versatility offered by leading platforms like Sonix, which supports approximately twice as many languages.

Pricing

While Descript has many worthwhile features, users have complained about their pricing tiers. While the prices of the lower tiers are relatively reasonable, the transcription minutes included in these packages will be insufficient for most consumers. 

However, the biggest problem with Descript’s pricing model is how it processes multiple speakers in a single file. The platform transcribes every speaker as a separate file. Therefore, if you have a 30-minute audio with three speakers, it will consume 90 minutes of your transcription minutes.

What Are the Best Descript Alternatives?

1. Sonix
2. Happy Scribe
3. Otter.ai
4. Trint
5. Transkriptor
6. Notta
7. Speak AI
8. Fireflies
9. Fathom
10. Rev

1. Sonix

When it comes to automated transcription, Sonix is the top contender in the market, with advanced artificial intelligence explicitly trained to create quality AI transcriptions. 

With accuracy rates consistently reaching 99%, Sonix is the most coherent and precise transcription tool in the industry.

Sonix is ideal for content creators, video/audio producers, filmmakers, social media creators, educators, business professionals, and individuals who need to make their content accessible to a wider audience.

But, transcription isn’t the only primary feature of Sonix. If you frequently work with multiple languages and don’t want to pay for an expensive human translator, Sonix can also use that same advanced AI to translate your content.

The turnaround time and fast transcription make it capable of processing several hours of content in just a few minutes, making it one of the leading Descript competitors out there.

Here’s a quick summary of Sonix’s core features.

Features

Accuracy

The defining feature of Sonix is its high degree of accuracy. The tool can generate subtitles, captions, and transcripts with an accuracy rate of 99%, thus making it the number one leading Descript competitor in terms of accuracy. Sonix is highly capable of creating ready-to-use transcripts that can be uploaded with minimal edits.

Security

Sonix is known as being one of the safest and most secure AI transcription services, particularly when compared to Descript. Here are all the security features Sonix offers with a brief description of what they do.

Here’s a list of all the other impressive features you get with Sonix.

• Many Integrations: To allow for a smoother workflow across various platforms, Sonix offers a variety of integrations focused on multimedia, productivity, and research, along with a range of APIs that consumers will find helpful in day-to-day usage.
• Team Collaboration Features: Sonix is equipped with sophisticated team collaboration functionalities, facilitating transcript sharing and editing among team members. This feature represents a significant advantage for enterprise users who use a shared Sonix subscription, enhancing collective productivity and workflow efficiency.
• AI Analysis Features: To help make the data from transcriptions more actionable, Sonix has various AI analysis features that turn transcripts into comprehensible data. Tools like Automated Summaries, Sentiment Analysis, Thematic Analysis, Speaker Labeling, etc., can make it much easier to skim through transcriptions and pick up on the key aspects of the file.
• Supported Languages: Sonix offers its transcription and translation services in over 40 languages, making it a great option for individuals looking to reach a global audience.

Pricing

Besides the free trial with 30 minutes of free transcription, Sonix has a reasonable pricing structure with flat fees and zero hidden charges.

• Standard Pay-As-You-Go Plan: $10 Per Hour
• Premium Subscription: $5 Per Hour flat fee along with $22 per user
• Enterprise Subscription: You can contact Sonix directly for pricing information.

Want to put Sonix’s industry-leading accuracy and enterprise-grade security to the test? Sign up for our free trial to get 30 minutes of free transcription. No credit card required.

2. Happy Scribe

Happy Scribe is another formidable contender in the transcription industry. The defining feature of Happy Scribe is that it combines human and artificial intelligence to create subtitles, captions, and transcriptions in over 120 languages.

Happy Scribe is a competent tool if you’re willing to pay for human-powered services, but is lacking in terms of AI accuracy. Similar to Descript, the main focus of Happy Scribe as a business is not AI transcription. Happy Scribe primarily operates as a human-powered transcription service, with AI-driven transcription acting as a secondary feature. This human-centric approach limits its accuracy to a maximum of 85%. 

Features

• Language Capabilities: Happy Scribe currently supports 120+ languages, allowing users to create transcripts with a high degree of accessibility.
• Human-Powered Services: The defining feature of Happy Scribe is that it uses a massive network of human translators, captioners, and transcribers to produce high-quality transcripts manually. However, this feature is fairly expensive. 
• Ease of Collaboration: The interactive editor is highly regarded for enabling teams to concurrently edit captions and transcripts.

Pricing

Happy Scribe offers a free plan to new clients, although the transcription minutes and features are severely lacking. You also can’t export anything without paying for a plan, and you’ll barely get any transcription minutes. 

• Basic Plan: $17 Per Month – 120 Minutes of Transcriptions
• Pro Plan: $29 Per Month – 300 Minutes of Transcriptions
• Business Plan: $49 Per Month – 600 Minutes of Transcriptions
• Enterprise Plan: Contact Happy Scribe Directly for Pricing and Features
• Human Transcription:  $1.75 per Minute

3. Otter AI

Otter.ai, simply known as Otter, is another reliable Descript alternative, particularly if you are looking to transcribe meetings. 

Otter’s primary appeal is in its ability to record and transcribe meetings from popular platforms like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, and others. Because of how simple the integrations are, customers often praise Otter for its ease of use.

However, a significant limitation of Otter, which resulted in it being ranked third on our list, is its language support. Otter only functions in English, a considerable constraint compared to tools like Sonix, which supports over 39 languages.

Features

• Meeting Transcriptions: The standout feature of Otter is its ability to create real-time transcriptions of lectures, online conversations, and meetings. There is an editor that you’ll likely need to use to fine-tune the transcripts, which are about 83% accurate.
• Automatic Meeting Summaries: Another popular feature of Otter is its ability to create automated summaries of conversations, so you can take away the most important details without reading through the entire transcript.
• The Pilot: OtterPilot, is a sophisticated AI tool designed to automatically participate in video and audio conferences, providing real-time transcription. This function is particularly beneficial for those requiring their meetings to be recorded and analyzed for future review.

Pricing

Many consumers appreciate Otter for its competitive pricing, though it’s important to note that prices may rise over time, and subscription tiers often change, which is a major source of complaint among existing users.

• Basic Plan: No Cost – 300 Transcription Minutes and Up to 30 Minutes per Conversation
• Pro Plan: $16.99 per Month – 1,200 Transcription Minutes and up to 90 Minutes per Conversation
• Business Plan: $30 per Month: 6,000 Transcription Minutes and up to 4 Hours per Conversation
• Enterprise: Contact Otter Directly for Enterprise Details

4. Trint

If you are willing to pay a premium price for good quality transcriptions, Trint makes for a fair Descript alternative. With accuracy rates at 95%, it’s one of the best in the business, albeit with an expensive pricing.

It’s a great service with less-than-stellar packages; a point of contention that may drive individuals and smaller businesses toward more affordable options, such as Sonix.

Trint is targeted specifically towards newsrooms and journalists, although educators, content creators, and students fall within the category of Trint’s primary clientele. It comes with various collaborative and integrative features, as well as advanced artificial intelligence for easy and fast transcriptions and captions.

Features

• Captioning: Trint is a leading service for creating captions and subtitles for video content, allowing for a wider global reach.
• Transcriptions: Using various artificial intelligence-based technologies, such as speech recognition, Trint can take audio and video files and convert them into transcripts.
• Supported Languages: At this time, Trint supports transcription and translation in over 40 languages.
• Content Creation Integrations: Trint’s content creation integrations are top-of-the-line, making it a fan favorite among marketers and multimedia businesses.
• Transcript Analysis: Trint can analyze transcripts and identify key points, saving you from reading long texts. It delivers useful, actionable information quickly, within seconds.

Pricing

Although the results that Trint produces are adequate, the same can’t be said for its pricing structure, which is fairly expensive.

• Starter: $80 per Month – 300 transcription minutes
• Advanced: $100 per Month – 1200 transcription minutes
• Enterprise: You’ll need to contact Trint for Enterprise pricing and details

5. Transkriptor

Another notable alternative to Descript is Transkriptor, using advanced speech-to-text capabilities to create accurate transcripts out of audio files. It can create transcripts from audio files and in real-time as well.

Users have commented on its ease of use and short learning curve, which makes it a decent Descript alternative for beginners. 

Transkriptor’s focus is mainly on creating transcripts from interviews, lectures, and meetings, which should make it suitable for podcasters, students, journalists, lecturers, teachers, legal professionals, and more.

Features

• Language Capabilities: Transkriptor is able to record meetings and accurately transcribe them in over 20 languages, making it a good tool for global outreach.
• Automated Transcripts: The defining feature of Transkriptor is that it uses advanced speech-to-text technology, along with speaker recognition and other artificial intelligence-based tools, to create transcripts, both from files and in real-time scenarios.
• The AI Assistant: One of the best features of Trint is the AI assistant, which takes meeting notes, creates summaries and has other useful features to act as your personal note-taker.
• Editing Made Easy: Thanks to the timestamp feature, as well as the interactive editor, those using Transkriptor will find that editing transcripts is exceedingly simple.

Pricing

While Transkriptor’s prices are quite reasonable, they fall short when it comes to scalability.

• Lite: $9.99 per Month – 5 Hours of Transcription
• Premium: $24.99 per Month – 40 Hours of Transcription
• Enterprise: You’ll have to contact the Transkriptor team for details

6. Notta

As with Transkriptor, Notta is another leading Descript alternative for recording lectures and live meetings. Thanks to speech recognition, machine learning algorithms, and other artificial intelligence-based technologies, it can create transcripts, summaries, and more.

If you need an accurate transcription of a lecture, interview, meeting, or conversation, then Notta is worth considering. Not only can it handle real-time scenarios, but users can also upload files for transcription as well.

Features

• AI-Powered Transcripts: Notta uses its advanced machine learning capabilities to create transcripts from live meetings and conversations, as well as from pre-recorded files.
• Language Support: A defining feature of Notta is that it functions in over 104 languages, making it a great tool for recording meetings in a range of different languages.
• Concise Summaries: The artificial intelligence employed by Notta also has the ability to create concise summaries of transcripts, so you can gain valuable insights without having to waste time.
• Meeting Recording: Transcription aside, this service is also helpful for simple online meeting recording.
• Compatibility: Notta is highly recognized when it comes to compatibility. The tool has an app on both Android and iOS, along with a Chrome extension. If that isn’t enough, it has a variety of productivity integrations and syncing all transcripts on the cloud and on your devices.

Pricing

Notta offers a free plan that includes 120 minutes of monthly transcription, an appealing option despite the lack of additional features. However, its paid packages are quite reasonably priced.

• Pro: $13.99 per Month – 1,800 Minutes
• Business: $59 per Month (for two seats) – 2,400 Minutes
• Custom: Contact Notta Directly for Custom Plan Information

7. Speak AI

Speak AI is another leading Descript alternative, with its main focus being on providing users with useful insights about transcripts, such as sentiment analysis, speaker identification, keyword extraction and analysis, and thematic categories, among others.

The advanced artificial intelligence employed by Speak AI is fantastic for going back to analyze transcripts, making it an ideal choice for educators, business analysts, content creators, marketers, and anyone else who needs the ability to go back and gain the most valuable insights from any transcript.

Features

• Automated Transcripts: Speech recognition and other valuable features are employed to create transcripts of meetings and conversations, along with fast turnaround, which is a valuable asset for businesses.
• AI-Generated Summaries: Speak AI is able to create summaries of transcripts in a concise manner to provide you with the most important points, so you don’t have to waste time reading the whole transcript.
• Transcript Search and Analysis: The defining feature of Speak AI is that it allows users to perform a deep analysis of their transcripts. For instance, there is a deep search feature that lets users look for specific keywords and phrases in a transcript. It also comes with entity recognition, which helps identify names, locations, and organizations within a transcript. Users are also able to do a deep dive into the categories, themes, keywords, and sentiments featured in a transcript.

Pricing

Speak AI prices are reasonable with a pay-as-you-go model that’s a great option for people who have varying transcription needs every month.

• Pay-As-You-Go: $0 base price, you’ll be charged for the transcription you do.
• Starter: $29/month – 10 Hours per Month
• Custom: You’ll have to contact Speak AI for details. (Discounts for Annual Billing)

8. Fireflies

Fireflies is yet another leading alternative to Descript as far as recording meetings and conversations is concerned. Teams, professionals, businesses, teachers, and anyone else who has meetings, conversations, or lectures that require recording for future analysis should consider Fireflies.

Similar to the Descript alternatives we’ve discussed already, Fireflies also has great analytical features, so you can go back and gain valuable insights from your transcripts. To that end, its vast conferencing tool integration capabilities stand out among the pack.

Features

• Integrations: Fireflies can integrate with a long list of video conferencing tools, making integrations one of the top selling points of Fireflies.
• Meeting Recording: Fireflies can record video and audio from meetings and lectures, which can then be analyzed in the future.
• AI-Transcriptions and Summaries: Thanks to the advanced learning capabilities of the artificial intelligence employed by Fireflies, it can transcribe real-time conversations from many different video conferencing tools. It can create summaries of those transcripts, highlighting the most important points for quick reference.
• Advanced Analysis: For more than just quick reference, Fireflies allows users to do a deep dive into the transcripts, allowing for the extraction of keywords and main topics. It can also easily detect decisions and important actions within a conversation and then highlight them in the transcript.

Pricing

Many enjoy Fireflies as a Descript alternative due to its fair pricing structure, particularly regarding the free plan. The free plan here is a generous one, with 800 minutes of storage and unlimited transcriptions per month, although there are practically no other features in the free plan.

• Pro: $18 per Seat/Month – Unlimited Transcription + 8,000 Minutes of Storage
• Business: $29 per Seat/Month – Unlimited Transcription + Unlimited Storage
• Enterprise: $39 per Seat/Month – Unlimited Transcription + Unlimited Minutes of Storage (and any other Enterprise exclusive features)

9. Fathom

Fathom is another tool designed for recording and transcribing online meetings and conversations. If you often engage in video conferences, meetings, or online classes, Fathom is worth considering. It’s an advanced tool that can learn and recognize speakers, with transcripts generally being fairly high in quality.

Features

• Meeting Recording in Real Time: The defining feature of Fathom AI is that it can perform real-time meeting recording, which is ideal for future analysis.
• Fast Transcripts: Fathom AI can create transcripts of online conferences and meetings in real-time, which can be accessed as soon as the meeting is done.
• Transcript Summaries and Notes: Fathom AI can provide users with convenient summaries of transcripts, with the most important insights being highlighted, so you don’t have to read massive blocks of writing.
• Language Capabilities: At this time, Fathom operates in seven languages, which is very limited and does not allow a lot of room for versatility.

Pricing

Fathom AI lags in pricing and plan diversity, offering few options that aren’t particularly cost-effective.

• Standard: $32 per Month per User (limited features)
• Pro: $39 per Month per User

10. Rev.ai

Rev.ai is a good alternative to Descript worth considering, with its advanced speech recognition technology being able to create accurate transcripts of video and audio files. Journalists, businesses, content creators, and anyone working with audio or video files on a regular basis can make Rev a great part of their arsenal.

As for pre-recorded audio, the speech-to-text API stands out among the competitors, as it makes it exceedingly simple to gain valuable insights from audio files. It is a global leader in speech recognition and other artificial intelligence transcription features, although it’s certainly not the most cost-effective.

Features

• AI-Powered and Human Transcriptions: Rev.ai is able to create accurate transcripts of audio and video files. However, Rev also features a vast network of human transcribers and translators to create transcriptions, although this is slow and pricey.
• ASR: The reason that Rev is able to be so accurate is thanks to its highly advanced ASR or advanced speech recognition system.
• Transcript Analysis: Thanks to speaker identification, timestamps, and other analytical features, users can easily gain valuable insights and quick facts from transcriptions without having to read the entirety.
•  Enterprise-Grade API: Rev features enterprise-grader API to allow for easy integration with a business’ existing systems.
• Language Capabilities: Rev.ai is able to provide subtitles for video and audio files in various languages. The global subtitle translator, as it’s called, is powered by humans.

Pricing

What stands out about Rev.ai is that it has plans that are ideal for both individuals and smaller needs, as well as for large-scale business use.

• AI Transcription: $0.25 Per Minute
• AI Captions: $0.25 Per Minute
• AI Subscription: $29.99 Per Month (1,200 Minutes of Transcripts with a 14 Day Free Trial, $0.15 for every minute over 1,200 minutes)
• Human Transcription: $1.50 Per Minute
• Global Subtitles (Human Powered): $5 to $12 Per Minute
• Rev for Business: Contact Rev Sales for Information

What is the Best Descript Alternative?

Top 10 Descript Alternatives – Final Thoughts

Descript earns praise for its transcription services, yet its design, particularly the handling of crosstalk, falls short of expectations. Additionally, its pricing structure can be a deterrent for many customers. 

For those prioritizing transcription quality and versatility, Sonix stands out as the superior option. Boasting 99% accuracy, enterprise-level security, support for over 39 languages, and budget-friendly plans, Sonix emerges as the top Descript alternative on the market. Experience Sonix’s capability firsthand today. Start your 30-minute free trial. No credit card needed.