# TranscribeBench

> Measured accuracy and cost of transcription and subtitle tools.

Written by one author, a Principal ML engineer (10+ years in machine learning, from research to production; Former Staff ML Engineer working on document extraction and OCR; Former Lead ML Platform Engineer for a 5,000-stream computer-vision platform; Contributor to vLLM; creator of Videoflow (1,000+ GitHub stars)). The tools run in the browser and never upload files. Every page has a Markdown version at the same path with .md appended.

## Tools

- [Subtitle converter: SRT, WebVTT, ASS and SBV, with time shift, frame-rate change and a validation report](https://transcribebench.com/subtitle-converter.md): Convert subtitles between SRT, WebVTT, ASS/SSA and YouTube SBV in your browser. Shift every cue earlier or later, re-time subtitles for a different frame rate (23.976 to 25 and back), re-wrap long lines, split cues that run too long, and get a report of overlaps, negative durations and bad timestamps. Files are never uploaded.
- [Transcription cost calculator: monthly cost of Otter, Rev, Descript, Riverside, Sonix, Happy Scribe, Trint and speech-to-text APIs](https://transcribebench.com/transcription-cost-calculator.md): Enter how many hours of audio you transcribe a month and the cheapest plan that fits for each vendor appears, from apps like Otter, Rev, Descript, Riverside, Sonix, Happy Scribe and Trint to the OpenAI, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Google, AWS and Azure APIs and human transcription. Every price is read from the vendor's own page and dated; unknowns say "Check vendor".
- [Word error rate (WER) calculator: alignment, substitutions, deletions and insertions](https://transcribebench.com/wer-calculator.md): Paste a correct transcript and a machine transcript to get the word error rate and character error rate, the substitutions, deletions and insertions, and a word-by-word alignment showing every error. Normalization options are documented one by one. The same code scores the TranscribeBench benchmark, and it matches jiwer's counts.

## Benchmarks and comparisons

- [Whisper on 34 minutes of real recordings: word error rate by condition (baselines, October 2026)](https://transcribebench.com/whisper-baseline-benchmark.md): Four sizes of OpenAI's open-source Whisper model, run on a laptop CPU over 23 openly licensed English clips with human transcripts: clean and harder read speech, the same speech in restaurant noise, accented conversations and four-person meetings. Word error rate by condition, with intervals, every transcript and the code to reproduce it. These are baselines for comparing tools, not a ranking of products.

## Guides

- [How to choose a transcription tool: measure it on your audio, then price your hours](https://transcribebench.com/how-to-choose-a-transcription-tool.md): A four-step way to pick transcription software, an API or a human service: decide what kind of service you need, expect accuracy to depend on your recordings more than on the brand, test two or three candidates on ten minutes of your own audio with a word error rate calculator, and price your real monthly hours. With measured numbers and sourced prices.
- [How TranscribeBench measures transcription accuracy and cost](https://transcribebench.com/methodology.md): The test set and its licenses, how clips were chosen, what word error rate is and how it is computed, the normalization applied before scoring, how baselines and commercial tools are run, how prices are collected, and the limits of all of it. Written down before results were collected.

## Optional

- [About TranscribeBench and its author](https://transcribebench.com/about.md): Who runs TranscribeBench, the credentials behind it, how the site is funded, and how to report a wrong price, a scoring error or a problem with a tool.
- [Affiliate disclosure](https://transcribebench.com/affiliate-disclosure.md): How TranscribeBench may earn money from referral and affiliate links, how those links are labeled, the rules that keep commissions out of test results and cost comparisons, and the current list of relationships.
- [Privacy](https://transcribebench.com/privacy.md): TranscribeBench's tools run in your browser. Subtitle files and transcripts you open or paste are never uploaded. The site sets no cookies and has no accounts. Analytics, if switched on, is cookie-free.