Trint Review | PCMag

Transcribing interviews or meetings can be a job in itself. Listening and writing down everything word-for-word is difficult and time-consuming. That’s where transcription services such as Trint come in. Trint’s automated transcription service features an excellent online editor, fast file processing, a slick mobile app, and good security policies. However, in testing, the transcriptions themselves were less impressive. Complex audio files produced error-ridden results, though less complex files were about average in accuracy. If you only plan to use the service for simple recordings with one or two speakers, Trint is a solid choice. Otherwise, Editors’ Choice winner Rev, a human-powered transcription service, is the better option.

How Much Does Trint Cost?

Trint breaks the transcription service model mold by not offering pay-as-you-go pricing. Services start at $60 per month for the Starter plan, which includes transcriptions for seven files per month. For $75 a month, a single user can subscribe to the Advanced plan, which includes unlimited transcription. The Pro Team plan is for two to 50 users and includes unlimited transcription and collaborative tools such as shared workspaces, simultaneous editing, and centralized billing. Trint also offers Enterprise plans for an undisclosed monthly fee that includes real-time live transcription services and onboarding and training for team members.

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In the automated transcription service category, Trint costs the most up front. TranscribeMe’s Machine Express transcription starts at 7 cents per minute, Temi starts at 25 cents per minute, and Sonix starts at $10 per hour. 

Trint supports both audio and video file uploads under three hours in length or 3GB in size. Trint’s support page notes that you can upload files larger than these size limits, but upload errors may occur. Audio file types supported include AAC, M4A, MP3, MP4, and WAV. Video files include AVI, MOV, MP4, and WMA. Unfortunately, the service does not accept links to video files or YouTube videos.

Getting Started With Trint

Transcriptions are called Trints, and you can create them with ease in the work space. Once you’ve logged in and signed up for a plan, you upload audio or video using the bright yellow Upload button in the top left corner of the screen. Select or drag and drop files into the pop-up window, and then click the bright blue Upload button at the bottom of the popup window. 

Click the bright yellow Transcribe button, and wait for the transcription to complete. When Trint finishes transcribing the file, you move on to the editing process.

Trint’s Web Interface

In the web interface, you can create Trints (transcriptions) and Stories. A Story consists of key moments or highlights from any of your Trints, reordered and put together into one file.

On the left side of the screen are sections labeled Your Space and Other. My Trints and Stories, Recent Trints, Shared With Me, My Trint Players, and Vocab Builder appear in the Your Space section. The Other section lets you access Support and other information about the service.

Trint Players stitch text to video files, karaoke-style, and then provide a video embed for your website. It’s a slick accessibility tool that doubles as an SEO booster for video content because the spoken word becomes searchable by search engines. I haven’t seen other transcription services offering this kind of feature, and it’s a serious value-add for anyone building a business with video-based content. 

The Vocab Builder lets you create a list of custom words to make your future Trints more accurate. Sonix has a similar function called the Custom Dictionary, which allows you to improve transcription accuracy by listing proper names, technical terms, uncommon phrases, and unique spellings.

The rest of the screen holds the Trints and Stories you create. Each file has a creation date, duration, edit date, and status. Double-clicking on a file name opens the online transcription editor. 

Otter's web interface is more enterprise-friendly, with its ability to automatically share transcriptions of meetings with everyone on a calendar invite. You can also invite other Otter users to a group space within Otter's web interface, where you can record audio or share imported audio and video files.

Editing, Time to Process, and Privacy

As mentioned above, Trint is an automated transcription service, meaning no humans transcribe your files. Instead, Trint’s algorithms produce a machine-generated transcript, and you can edit the resulting text to perfection. In general, most automated transcription services have much lower accuracy than human-based services. True to this trend, in testing Trint produced less accurate transcripts than all the human-based services we tested. 

Trint says that it can process an audio file in about the time equivalent to the length of the file. So, for example, a 30-minute audio or video file should take roughly 30 minutes to complete. In testing, the service was a good deal faster than these minimum speeds. For example, it returned my 10-minute file in three minutes. 

Trint uses 256-bit AES encryption, and the company has a strict no-tolerance policy for unauthorized employee access.

How Accurate Is Trint?

I use the same five-minute recordings to test the accuracy of all transcription services: a simple audio test and a complex audio test. The simple audio test is a recording of a two-person podcast taken in a home studio with prosumer-level audio equipment. There's minimal cross-talk on the audio file, and both speakers are native English speakers with American accents. The simple test is for automated transcription services only.

The complex audio is a three-person sports podcast recorded with professional-level microphones. There’s a lot of cross-talk, slang, and sports jargon. It’s a challenging recording, but all the voices are audible. The complex audio is for both automated and human-based transcription services.

Trint’s performance in the simple audio test produced middle-of-the-road results. It took the service a little longer than usual to transcribe, with the text arriving almost nine minutes after I submitted the audio. The other automated transcription services performed faster than Trint. 

For each transcription test, I mark an error wherever there is an incorrect word, a missing or extra word, or a speaker misidentified in the text. For example, in the simple test, Trint produced 14 errors, making the text file usable but in need of editing. 

Trint produced 26 errors in the complex test after processing the file for just one minute and 31 seconds, the fastest processing time recorded. Accuracy was low, however. Only Temi, Otter, and Scribie had worse results in the complex testing scenario.

Online Editor

To make usable text files from Trint’s transcriptions, you have to use the service’s online text editor. Double click on the Trint you want to edit, and the online editor opens. You can playback the audio at the bottom of the screen to listen to garbled or nonsensical audio and improve the transcription by hand. There’s also an option to change the speaker names, add comments, highlights, markers, strike-through text, and translations. You can also create closed captions for audio and video files from the online editing tool. 

After you've cleaned up each transcribed section, you can tick a box on the left side of the screen to record your progress. This feature is beneficial for long transcription files or shared transcription workspaces because you can pick up with where you left off during the editing process. You can also access different version histories of your transcription by clicking the link in the top-right corner of the screen.

I would like to see Trint mark potential areas of difficulty in the text to make the editing process faster and easier. Scribie and Sonix both include a feature that analyzes your text for tricky sections.

Mobile App

I tested Trint’s iOS app on an iPhone 12 mini running iOS 14. Trint does not offer an Android app. The Trint iPhone app allows you to record audio from the app, import audio and video, and record and transcribe outbound phone calls. The layout is clean and straightforward, and you can access files you uploaded via the web application.

Using the app is easy. Just download Trint from the App Store and log into your account. This brings up the Home screen where you can choose to Record Audio, Record a Phone Call, Import Video or Audio, view your audio and call recordings, view recent Trints from the online app, or view shared Trints.

I recorded a very short script to test the Trint app. The transcription of this 24-second audio file showed up almost instantly. You can share the transcribed Trint by clicking the Share button in the top right corner of the screen. However, the only sharing option is via URL. You cannot share DOC files to email addresses or share via SMS. In addition, you cannot edit the transcription in the app. You can only edit transcriptions via the online editor.

Otter has a more robust app because it allows users to edit transcripts from within the app. Trint’s app is similar to Rev’s and GoTranscript’s, allowing you to make recordings and submit them for transcription.

Give Trint a Try

Trint’s transcription service gives you a way to save time and be more productive. It's adequate for simple transcription jobs, but I cannot recommend it for complex files. The Trint online editor is well designed, however, and the Trint Players could be game-changers when it comes to making videos and audio files more accessible. 

The service’s subscription model is suitable for users who need to transcribe a large volume of simple audio and video files every month, but it won’t work for everyone. We recommend human-powered transcription services for more complex jobs. Editors’ Choice winner Rev is expensive, but its human-powered transcription is more accurate than Trint, and the turnaround time for transcriptions is very fast.