Show HN: I built Speech is Cheap for fast, long-form audio transcription

1 point

a year ago

Hi HN, I created a transcription service called Speech is Cheap. I put in a lot effort to make it fast without losing too much accuracy. For instance, it takes 10 minutes to transcribe ~21 hours of Little Women [1]. I also just released the add-ons to classify audio, diarize speakers, and filter out segments based on the models' confidence scores. So it takes about a minute to process the noisy, hour-long Starship 8 launch with all those features enabled [2]. Transcribing these respective files costs $1.16 and $0.11 for subscribers or $2.50 and $0.23 for pay-as-you-go users.

I released the MVP about six months ago. But some users wanted to parse speakers, so I spent the last couple of months reworking the entire pipeline. Initially, the biggest challenge was creating the custom voice activity detection (VAD) functionality. Once that was done, I got more confident and incorporated a powerful diarization model as well. The rest of the time was spent on fine-tuning and optimizing everything end-to-end. I learned a ton and will blog about it soon.

Sharing Speech is Cheap with HN is a big step for me. My main focus has been on the engineering side, so I'm a bit puzzled by how to properly market it. If you have experiences on what genuinely works to spread the word, I'd be very grateful to hear your thoughts and perspectives.

You can try it out completely for free by picking the Pay-as-you-go option and applying this `HN5` $5 off promo code, which is good for 2500 minutes of regular transcriptions. I'll stick around to answer any questions.

[1] https://youtu.be/yduuUGUj5Bg » https://cdn.speechischeap.com/out/little_women.json

[2] https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1897438948458189156 » https://cdn.speechischeap.com/out/starship8.json