[shadowgovt]

It's honestly pretty fascinating to watch perfect be the enemy of the good in this space. As a result of the birth of cheap-to-free machine translation of human language, the space of things available on the global market has become incredibly vast, because the good-enough stab at translation is often good enough for a dedicated hacker to make the thing work anyway.

[ghaff]

It applies to even English language transcriptions as well. Do I pay pennies a minute or a $1+ a minute? It depends on the use case and my budget. If my time is expensive and I'm publishing externally (e.g. for a professional podcast or an interview for a client), I'll probably go with a human. If I just want to refer to some notes to pull out a quote or go back to check something? An ML transcription with timestamps is probably fine. Ditto if the alternative to ML transcription is nothing.