Aiko

I’ve been using Aiko on Apple Voice Memo Recordings of technical conference sessions, webinars, and training sessions. Initially on an iPhone X, and now on an iPhone 16. Aiko’s transcriptions are way more accurate than Apple’s transcriptions. Aiko takes more time to transcribe but produces a more comprehensible product with less scrubbing required. In fact I find Apple’s output to be mostly incomprehensible. Aiko works through accents and ambient and competing noise. It does its best to decipher names and comes close in difficult cases and keeps errors consistent so you can find and replace easily. It does OK with technical jargon as well - within reason. Whereas Apple’s transcriptions totally lose it and produce gobbledygook. This app is highly recommended as a very helpful productivity tool.

Sindre - you are my hero. There are various ways to use this app but one of my favorites so far is using the iPhone Voice Memos app to record (with all of the sound editing advantages that that provides, including revisiting the saved recordings to edit/add to and then re-transcribe as needed) and then share the recording directly to Aiko for a very accurate transcription which can then be easily copied and pasted into any app that I desire. I recently got an iPhone 13 through work and I was surprised (and of course very pleased) with how much faster the transcription is compared to on my iPhone 11. As Sindre discusses in some of his responses, the app performs better on better hardware, so I assume it would be even faster on the newest iPhones(?). Another critical advantage for my particular needs is that the work is all done locally on the phone with no potentially sensitive information sent to the cloud, which is why I can use it for my work-related dictations. I have been using professional voice dictation software for many many years, but to have someone package the power of Whisper into an app that can be easily used on an iPhone that I can carry with me everywhere I go is a true game changer. I am sure, with the rapid development of AI, that there will be more and more advances as the months and years go by, but I will always be grateful that Sindre chose to provide this option for me right here and right now. We'll see how long the psychological effect lasts, but for now the highly reproducible and trustworthy transcription results from this app make me look forward to tasks that were previously much more stressful. Thank you Sindre. -Randy

I have researched endlessly trying to find my options to transcribe the many discussions I recorded with my parents about their past. Now that they are no longer with us I was looking for options to transcribe so many recordings with non-ideal audio. (We’d often chat with the TV on in the background, for example) I wasn’t expecting great results but hoping for a starting point and weeding through random background noise transcriptions. Somehow these things are so good and it only grabs the conversations. I need to clean them up a bit of course because no non-human translation is perfect, but it is so much better than I was hoping! I rarely leave reviews, but I’m almost in tears with how well this has suited my needs!