Happy Scribe vs WhisperAI
You have interviews in Spanish or Japanese, and you need them in English. On Happy Scribe, that audio gets counted twice: once for the transcript, once more for the translation. Ten hours of transcripts a month fit its $29 Pro plan. Add the English and you need Business, at $89. WhisperAI Business Pro is $24.99 a month with no minute limit, and translation is on every plan.
By Eman Khoubian, Founder & CEO
Happy Scribe and WhisperAI: transcription, translation and speaker identification
| WhisperAI | Happy Scribe | |
|---|---|---|
| Price a month | Free for 5 minutes a month. Premium is $14.99 for 120 minutes. Business Pro is $24.99 with no minute limit. | A one-time 10-minute free trial. Basic is $17 for 120 minutes, Pro $29 for 600, Business $89 for 6,000. |
| When the minutes run out | Premium stops taking uploads until you upgrade or the month renews, and unused minutes roll over up to 360. Business Pro has no limit. | A file over your balance is locked until you buy more minutes, at $0.20 each. Plan minutes don't roll over. |
| Translation | On every plan, into 87 languages, from any finished transcript | Into 80+ languages. Each translation uses as many minutes as the transcript, per language. |
| Transcription languages | 98, with automatic language detection | 150+ languages and dialects |
| Speaker identification | A Speaker Labels switch at upload, on every plan | Automatic speaker detection, on every plan |
| Subtitles | SRT and VTT, from the transcript or any of its translations | A subtitle editor, with 15+ export formats on Pro and Business |
| File size | 5 GB and 10 hours per file, on every plan | Bulk uploads take up to 25 files of 1 GB each |
| Meetings | Records the browser tab and your mic. No bot joins the call. | An AI Notetaker that joins Zoom, Google Meet and Teams calls |
| Claude and ChatGPT | Connectors on every plan | An MCP server for Claude and ChatGPT |
| Team seats | Enterprise: 5 seats for $75 a month | Pro: 3 seats. Business: 5 seats. |
| Human transcription | AI transcription only | From $2.00 a minute |
| Security | Aligns its security program with SOC 2 standards. TLS 1.3 in transit, AES-256 at rest. | SOC 2 Type 2 certified, GDPR, a data center in the EU |
Transcription pricing with translation: what Happy Scribe's minutes cover
Happy Scribe sells minutes, and one pool pays for transcripts, subtitles and translations. Its help center puts the rule plainly: "translating a 30-minute video will cost 30 minutes of credit for the transcript plus another 30 minutes for each translation." So a 60-minute interview you need in English takes 120 minutes, and 180 if you want French as well.
What one 60-minute interview uses up
Pro's 600 minutes cover 5 hours of audio translated into English. Past 7.5 hours, Business is the cheapest way through, and its 6,000 minutes last 50 hours with English, or 33 with English and French. Sixty hours with English comes to $329 for the month: Business plus 1,200 extra minutes.
What a month of audio costs, before and after you translate it into English
Annual billing doesn't change the count. Happy Scribe Business is $708 a year for 72,000 minutes, handed over at the start of the year. Business Pro is $199 a year, with no minutes to count.
Upload the month's recordings, translate the ones you need, and the bill stays the same. Recording two hours or less a month? Premium's 120 minutes cost $14.99.
Happy Scribe languages: how many it supports, and how it counts them
Happy Scribe says it transcribes "over 150 languages" and translates into 80+, "including dialects and accents." The dialects do a lot of that work. The list of popular languages on its languages page has 77 rows, and 145 entries once each language's variants are added in. Arabic comes with 16 variants, English with 16 and Spanish with 20.
WhisperAI transcribes 98 languages, with English in four variants, and translates into 87. Leave the language on auto-detect at upload and it picks the language for each file.
Neither total tells you whether your recording is covered. Look your language up on both lists. Ours is on the supported languages page.
How TurboScribe, Sonix and Trint price transcription and translation
TurboScribe sells one Unlimited plan, at $20 a month or $10 a month billed yearly, and translation into 134+ languages is part of it. What its unlimited covers is in our TurboScribe comparison.
Sonix sells hours. Advanced is $50 a month for 20 hours, extra hours are $10 each, and translation runs on your transcription hours. More in WhisperAI vs Sonix.
Trint Pro is $79 a seat a month. Its unlimited transcription in 50+ languages has a fair-use cap, and bulk-volume projects don't qualify. Translation into 70+ languages is included.
Rev's translation is done by fluent speakers, in 17 languages, and Otter transcribes six languages. We compare both on their own pages, Rev and Otter.
Translating foreign-language interviews into English with WhisperAI
If you're moving a project over, here's how it works on our side:
- Switch on Speaker Labels when you upload. It's off by default.
- Translate after the transcript, not at upload. The English version comes from the finished transcript, and it opens in a tab of its own.
- The English keeps the structure. Each line keeps its timestamp and its speaker label, and the translated tab exports SRT and VTT for subtitles.
- Old transcripts stay in Happy Scribe. There's no importer, so start with new recordings.
The clicks are in our guide to translating a transcript. To try it, upload a short interview on the 5 free minutes.
Transcribe and translate interviews without counting minutes
Start on the free plan, no card. On Business Pro, upload as many hours as you need.
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