FAQ
Located in the San Francisco Bay Area, VoiceBase allows you to store all of your audio and video recordings in the cloud, making them instantly searchable by keyword and easily shareable.
Our ground-breaking platform combines advanced voice recognition, indexing, storage and streaming technology to deliver a powerful keyword search experience from any web-enabled device.
Walter Bachtiger recognized the inefficiency in finding valuable voice wherever it lives. Having built a solution that scales and a team that understands the addressable market the company is poised for growth.
While VoiceBase can be used to create voice transcriptions, we primarily see ourselves as a Voice Search company, that allows you to find relevant sections within yours and other people's voice conversations (if they give you access). We believe that Voice Recognition Quality (current state of the industry) is not on a level where is allows us to replace the keyboard with a voice recorder or to turn a meeting into typed text (if you want to do that we suggest to you use our human transcription service). However speech to text technology is ideal for search and allowing you to find specific voice recordings as well as to jump right to the sections in a recording a search was done for.
In the future we will be able to make significant improvements to machine voice transcriptions and we hope to one day provide the opportunity to re-index all of your VoiceBase content with a nearly perfect transcription
General Questions
How much does VoiceBase cost?
VoiceBase IS FREE for basic use. You can upload as much content as you want, we add a transcription and store it for you in your personal account for ONE YEAR. After one year of free storage, content gets removed. At any point in time during this year you can chose to permanently keep a recording click on expiring next and select the green checkmark to store a recording permanently. The ONE TIME cost for permanent storage is roughly $1/h, less than that if more premium voice hours are purchased.
Human transcription (with permanent storage) is roughly at $150/h or less with larger vioce hour purchases.
How can I improve Voice Recognition Quality?
Most cell phone unfortunately have rather low quality microphones built in to record a meeting or anything, that means even if a person is close to the device and talking quality is often inadequate. Currently the Iphone 4 has probably one of the best microphones built in, one that rivals the ones in voice recorders. If you want to capture voice conversations, you should consider purchasing a voice recorder - Sony or Olympus are great choices. The cheap non brand models typically are not worth the trouble. If you are recording a lecture, a voice recorder right by the speaker (like a microphone) typically yields the best results.
What if I want to keep a voice recording permanently on VoiceBase?
Anytime during the free 1 year storage, a recording can be stored permanently by clicking on "expiring next". A click on the green check mark allows a user to store content permanently using the Voice-Hour-Balance listed on top. A 2h balance allows a user to store 2h of content permanently with a simple ONE TIME charge. No need to keep credit cards updated, or worry about making a payment monthly to keep content. With VoiceBase it's pay as you go. To store 1h of content permanently it costs about $1 (less if larger volumes are bought)
Why should I keep my Voice Recordings in Voicebase?
Often the only record of the work we do is in voice conversations. Mostly those conversations are very valuable whether they are interviews, lecture recordings, sermons or any other voice conversation. Typically voice recordings get stored on personal computers where fire, theft, viruses or simply neglicance threatens permanent storage. VoiceBase is using state of the art data centers, housed within Amazon AWS that provides save and secure storage that surpasses anything that most individuals and organizations can do by storing the content themselves. Additionally VoiceBase allows for the content to be searched and retrieved, shared if desired and interacted with others, from anywhere by using any web enabled device.
What about Music Recordings, can I use Voice Base to store my music library?
VoiceBase is optimized for Voice Recordings. While music sections or sound sections within a recording for example in a meeting or conference still work and get streamed, the audio code that converts all recordings for storage in VoiceBase is optimized for human voice. So voice recordings are stored in perfect quality, while any music uploads are stored at a slightly lower quality. It works if the sound is stored in the context of a meeting, however VoiceBase would be the wrong choice to be used purely for storing songs. Also the transcription engines used are optimized for human voice and will not work to transcribe the lyrics of a song. Any commercial platform to store or distribute music works better than VoiceBase. However for voice and spoken content VoiceBase is ideal.
What languages are supported in VoiceBase and do you plan to add others?
Currently VoiceBase supports US English only. Other English dialects as well as other languages are planned for roll out in the future.
Does VoiceBase share my recordings with others (as indicated in the terms of use)?
In order to provide the highest quality service to our users, involving 3rd parties is required and increases security and reliability for our users.
As an example VoiceBase is storing all files and data within Amazon's AWS data centers. By storing recordings and data within Amazon AWS, VoiceBase can leverage Amazon's infrastructure and provide our users with state of the art safe and secure storage as well as reliable service that is vastly superior to what VoiceBase could do by itself. However since Amazon is considered a third party that hosts our service our terms of use contain consent to share content with 3rd parties.
For users that select human transcriptions for their voice recordings, in order to create a human transcription, a third party (the transcriber) needs access to that particular voice file as well in order to create the human transcription.
To provide the service to our users, 3rd party sharing is needed and increases reliability and security. Without user consent, VoiceBase will not share recordings in any other way other then what is needed to provide the service or what we are legally required to by law enforcement.
For exact details please refer to the terms of use and the privacy policy.