A.I. Transcription for Quick Reference: Almost There, But Not Quite

I recently experimented with using A.I. transcription services to quickly generate rough transcripts of dailies for my notes, aiming to cut down on manual logging time. The goal was to have a searchable text document for key takes or problematic lines much faster than my usual process.

I fed several hours of multi-character dialogue from a drama into a couple of popular online A.I. transcription platforms. What worked well was the sheer speed; within minutes, I had text. For single-speaker, clear dialogue in ideal conditions, the accuracy was surprisingly high, often 90%+. This was fantastic for quickly identifying where a specific line occurred.

However, it completely fell apart with overlapping dialogue, any background noise, or when actors had distinct accents. Speaker identification was often a mess, attributing lines incorrectly, and the formatting was inconsistent, making it hard to read. It created more work correcting and re-formatting than it saved for anything beyond the most pristine audio.

I'm curious if anyone has found a sweet spot for A.I. transcription in their workflow, perhaps with specific preprocessing or a particular service that handles complex audio better?