CloudTranscribe

CloudTranscribe is a self-hosted speech-to-text platform built to be run as a business. It turns recordings into readable, editable transcripts — audiobooks, podcasts, interviews, voice content, meeting and customer service call recordings — and it ships with the accounts, plans, gateways and dashboards needed to charge other people for doing it.

Recognition comes from two vendors: Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, both using automatic speech recognition (ASR) built on deep learning. You connect your own keys, and if you only want one vendor, only that account is needed. Between them the platform covers over 170 languages and dialects, which is what makes it viable for markets a single-language tool cannot serve.

Three ways audio gets in

• Upload — drop a file in and get a transcript back, in MP3, OGG, WEBM and MP4 (AWS), or WAV and FLAC (AWS and GCP).
• Record — capture straight from the browser instead of finding a recorder first.
• Live Transcribe — real-time transcription as someone speaks, available in 12 languages. This one is AWS only.
• Instant results for short audio — GCP returns short files immediately rather than putting them through the long-file path.

Transcripts you can actually work with

• Speaker identification — separate up to 5 speakers in one recording, on either vendor, so interviews and calls read as a conversation rather than a wall of text.
• Timeline view — see the transcript against the audio's own timeline instead of guessing where a passage came from.
• Editable results — fix a name or a mishearing in place, including on live results, rather than exporting and correcting elsewhere.
• Store, share and download — every transcript is kept, shareable and downloadable, and raw GCP results are stored in the database alongside the processed text.
• Projects — group transcripts per client, show or case file instead of scrolling one long list.

Limits worth knowing before you price a plan

• AWS — up to 4 hours of audio per file (2-channel) and up to 2 GB per file.
• GCP — up to 8 hours per file (1-channel) with no file size limit.
• Free tiers — AWS gives 60 minutes a month free for the first year; GCP gives 60 minutes a month free with no time limit, which is enough to test the platform end to end before spending anything.

The business layer

• Plans — monthly subscriptions and prepaid packs, created from the admin panel.
• 8 payment gateways — PayPal, Stripe, Razorpay, Paystack and Mollie for subscriptions and prepaid; Braintree and Coinbase for prepaid; and offline bank transfer for both. All of them, and every SaaS feature, are covered by the Regular License.
• Crypto — Coinbase takes Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, USD Coin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and Dai on prepaid plans.
• Coupons and promo codes — discount codes for prepaid plans.
• Affiliate and referral system — referrals, earnings and payouts, included rather than bolted on.
• Finance dashboard — monthly and yearly income against estimated spend on the cloud STT vendors, which is the pair of figures that tells you whether a plan is priced above cost.
• FAQ manager — answer the questions buyers actually ask, from admin.
• Auto update — move to a new release without a manual file drop.

Requirements worth knowing

Built on PHP 7.4 and Laravel 8.4, with comprehensive documentation and six months of included support. Valid AWS and GCP accounts are needed for full coverage, or just the one account if you only intend to use one vendor. Transcription minutes are billed by the vendors at their own published rates, which is what the estimated-spend dashboard exists to track. The interface is fully responsive, but it is a web application rather than a native mobile app, and the Live and Record modes depend on browser microphone support, so they may not work in every mobile browser.

Ideal for

• Transcription services replacing manual typing with a reviewed machine draft.
• Podcasters and video teams producing show notes, captions and searchable archives.
• Journalists and researchers turning interview recordings into quotable text with speakers separated.
• Support and sales operations transcribing call recordings for quality review and training.
• Founders launching a paid speech-to-text service with plans, gateways and affiliates already built.
• Accessibility work producing transcripts and captions for audio and video content.