Temi: An amazing transcription tool for online entrepreneurs

As an online entrepreneur, there are a lot of things you might want to transcribe:

• Podcast interviews to create show notes
• Customer research interviews to do research for new content, products and services
• Customer feedback calls to improve your existing online courses
• Testimonial videos to convert into written testimonials
• Coaching calls to create new content
• Online course videos to create worksheets or summaries
• …and more

And if you only want to transcribe your videos once in a while (or typically record videos that are 10-15 minutes long), then using “real person” transcription services like Rev might make a lot of sense for you.

But if you want to get tens of hours of customer research interviews transcribed, using a service like Rev can quickly become prohibitively expensive (unless you’re ok with spending thousands of dollars on transcriptions).

Since Rev charges $1/minute for transcriptions, that means:

• Transcribing a 10-minute testimonial video will cost you $10
• Transcribing an online course consisting of ten 15-minute videos will cost you $150
• Transcribing 20 customer research interviews of 30 minutes will cost you $600

Until recently, the only alternatives were:

• Doing it yourself (which can be a long, grueling process that isn’t worth your time)
• Getting your assistant to do it (which might be more expensive than a transcription service)
• Hiring a student or someone “cheaper” via Fiverr (which might not give you the quality of transcriptions you would want).

And if you wanted to get transcriptions FAST… The only real option was paying a huge premium or doing it yourself (not fun).

Luckily, there’s now a better solution: Temi.

Temi is an automated transcription algorithm that helps you transcribe your videos within minutes, at only $0.1 per minute, which can be awesome if you want to transcribe tens of hours of videos FAST.

(If this sounds a bit salesy now, don’t worry – you won’t find any affiliate links in this post since Temi doesn’t even have an affiliate program – it’s just plain awesome).

Temi is awesome for…

• Getting a “good enough” transcription done FAST that you can use to pull quotes from videos
• Transcribing a TON of videos at 1/10 of a cost that you would pay a transcriptionist
• Skimming and finding interesting parts of videos that you would otherwise spend a lot of time finding (“when did we talk about this topic again?”)

For example, I’ve recorded 18 interviews (roughly 60 minutes each) for my Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Email List, and Temi makes it insanely easy for me to pull quotes from these interviews to include them in my guide.

If I used a service like Rev, transcribing all the interviews would cost me about $1080 (ugh). With Temi, it only cost me $108, which makes a lot more sense for a guide.

What you shouldn’t use Temi for

Temi is amazing for imperfect transcriptions (I’ll show you what I’m talking about in a second).

But if you’re looking for 100% correct transcriptions that you want to include in your online course, Temi might not be the best option, as it WILL make some mistakes.

Temi is amazing for transcriptions for YOUR eyes, not for eyes of your customers.

The good news is that if you want to transcribe your course videos yourself, Temi CAN do 80% of the work for you and drastically cut down the time it will take you to transcribe a full video.

Even though it’s an algorithm, Temi is surprisingly good

When I first heard about Temi, I was sceptical.

How good an a robot actually be? It was a lot better than I expected.

Here’s an example of a transcription from one of the interviews I transcribed recently:

Is it perfect? No. But you can probably agree with me that it’s pretty damn good.

It’s more than enough for me to skim through the interview quickly and pull out the interesting parts that I can include in my Ultimate Guide.

How Temi works (and the awesome features it has)

Temi is simple and intuitive to use (and you can even try it out for free).

When you go to Temi’s website, you can just click “Select audio/video file”.

Once you set up an account with Temi, you can even choose between uploading a file or simply pasting in a video from popular services like YouTube or Facebook.

That means that if you want to skim through a transcription of a long YouTube video, you can do that as well.

Once you upload the video that you want to transcribe, you’ll simply check out, wait a few minutes, and get an email with the link to the transcription once it’s done:

As you can see, my 47-minute video was transcribed in 8 minutes.

Once your video is transcribed, you can go and review your transcription:

As you do that, there are a couple of really cool features you can use.

Temi helps you synchronize your video with the transcript with the “side-by-side video” feature

To the right of the transcription, you’ll see a “side by side” video that is synchronized with the transcription:

This is a cool feature because it highlights the text that was transcribed:

And you can click on any word in the transcription and play the video at that exact word:

You can then listen to the recording of parts that were incorrectly transcribed, and quickly pull the actual quotes you’re looking for.

It also makes it easy for you to fix the mistakes in the transcriptions if you wish to do that.

Temi helps you spot (and fix) the mistakes with the “Low Confidence Phases” feature

If Temi knows it didn’t transcribe the word correctly, it will highlight it in brown color for you (which you can easily spot):

You can then just write over the mistakes with the correct transcription (or remove any “umms”, “ahhs”, and “you knows”) as if you were editing a word document:

Temi’s other cool features

The side-by-side video view and low confidence features were the ones I used the most, but Temi also lets you:

• Highlight important parts of the transcription
• Find and replace words in the transcription
• Download the transcription or share (email) it to others

It’s not super robust by any means, but it does everything you need it to do.

Temi Bottom Line

Temi is an amazing tool that I’ve been using for months now, that I wanted you to know about (and my clients love it too).

If you have a lot of customer research calls or online course content that you’d like to transcribe, give Temi a shot(and let me know how you like it).

If you transcribe your own videos and want to speed up the transcription process,  you’ll love Temi as well.

It won’t give you perfect transcriptions, but it will give you transcriptions that are surprisingly good, 80% correct, insanely fast and at a tenth of a price you’d pay a real person to transcribe your videos.

And if you like it, tell others about it (or share this post with them to show them why it’s awesome).

-Primoz