The Differences Between the Rev.com and Rev.ai APIs & Why You Should Care

If you’ve ever needed to extract actionable data from audio files, you’re probably already well aware of the associated inefficiencies. Say your business has created a great new podcast, but you need a transcript for the hearing impaired, or maybe you’ve developed compelling marketing videos introducing your latest product, but these new details can’t be found via an organic Google search because they haven’t been captured in text on your website. 

In situations like these, you could go through the laborious effort of transcribing everything yourself or hiring a contractor to do so. However, systematic solutions to this problem already exist, and the best bang for your buck lies in leveraging crowdsourced transcription efforts or speech recognition technology as are available in the Rev.com and Rev.ai APIs.

Rev.com API for More Accurate Speech-to-Text

If you want the highest possible accuracy in your transcriptions then the Rev.com API is ideally suited to your needs. This API provides endpoints for creating and retrieving orders, attaching audio or video files, and providing feedback to our transcription team. 

Sending files to Rev is seamless via the API, and for automated tasks that you perform regularly you can hook it into your audio/video platform using Zapier or one of the many native integrations that come included. As an example, with Zapier you could create a workflow to automatically trigger the Rev.com transcription process every time you upload a new show to your favorite podcasting host such as Podcast.co. 

In that same workflow, you could set up another integration to automatically send an email blast to your subscribers via MailChimp, alerting them to the availability of new content once the transcription is ready. 

The best part of the Rev.com service is that your transcription will be worked on by a dedicated team of experts with a fast turnaround time and guaranteed final accuracy of at least 99 percent. When you outsource your transcriptions to many of the existing services, you’ll often find that the final result is riddled with grammatical or spelling errors, the result of teams working in foreign countries. 

In contrast, the Rev.com backend has more than 50,000 professionals, all vetted native English speakers in the US who work around the clock on incoming requests. This is the largest onshore team of professional, human transcribers in the entire United States. Once your transcription is complete, it is reviewed by a dedicated team of quality analysts who ensure that the output matches the expected result. At only $1.25 per audio minute for the entire process, this is an incredible value that can’t be found anywhere else. Rev.com is trusted by over 170,000 customers and is relied on by corporate giants such as Visa and CBS.

The Rev.ai API: Fast Turnarounds and Best-in-Class Automatic Speech-to-Text

While the Rev.com API offers the highest-quality transcription and captioning by native speakers, sometimes you need results within minutes or even instantaneously. In those circumstances, the Rev.ai API has you covered. It provides best-in-class automatic speech-to-text recognition powered by cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

The API offers asynchronous and streaming services which can be used for transcribing pre-recorded and live media, respectively. That’s right, the APIs are so fast that audio can be transcribed in real time for use in streaming services, software, applications, web apps, and more.

Both the asynchronous and real-time API versions incorporate advanced features such as the ability to add custom vocabularies for coverage of non-standard words and phrases, inverse text normalization (which handles conversion of entities like dates, times, and dollar amounts to be properly formatted), automatic disfluency filtering, profanity filtering, time-stamping, and automated speaker separation. 

All of these features work together to ensure that transcribed text is accurate and faithful to the audio from which it was taken. They also help to obviate the manual legwork associated with filtering and correcting transcriptions. 

The Rev.ai API is extremely cost effective and can help your organization avoid budget concerns. For example, if you have older, archived content that you’ve avoided transcribing or captioning due to cost concerns, Rev.ai can help make it accessible.

What’s more, the Rev.ai API has been benchmarked against other automatic speech recognition services and consistently comes out on top, beating industry titans such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others. As the linked article shows, the Rev.ai service beat out four major competitors on 60 percent of tested audio files based on the calculated word error rate.

With the Rev.ai APIs you can be sure that you’re getting the fastest and most accurate AI-powered audio transcriptions for your dollar.