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Caption lecture recordings for accessibility

Education teams with an accessibility obligation and a recording backlog. Captions are required, manual captioning is slow, and auto-captions from video platforms have no punctuation or speaker labels.

What you end up with

SRT and VTT per lecture from the same job that produced the transcript.

The flow

TriggerThe lecture recording is published or lands in storage.
SubmitOne job produces every format — you do not run it again per format.
CollectPull result?format=srt and result?format=vtt from the same job id.
AttachUpload the caption track alongside the video.

# submit — returns immediately, does not block
curl -X POST https://whipscribe.com/api/v1/transcribe/url \
  -H "X-API-Key: $KEY" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: lecture-recordings-to-captioned-lessons-$SOURCE_ID" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com/recording.mp4",
       "diarize":true,
       "word_timestamps":true}'

→ 202 {"job_id":"a1b2…","status":"queued"}

# then poll — a self-serve (Pro) key collects by polling
curl "https://whipscribe.com/api/v1/jobs/$JOB" -H "X-API-Key: $KEY"
→ {"status":"processing"} … {"status":"done"}

Watch for this. Five formats come from one job. Re-submitting the same file per format is the most common way teams pay five times for one transcription.

What it costs

Rate$0.008 / min

Per audio hour$0.48

a 3-hour recording$1.44

CreditsNever expire

A 12-week course of two-hour lectures is 24 hours — about $12 for the term. $8 per 1,000 minutes — about $0.48 an audio hour — and credits never expire.

Why this needs an API rather than a person

Compliance is per-item and continuous, which is exactly the shape a human should not be in.

No subscription to size wrongCompeting transcription tools sell $25–$65 monthly plans with a minute cap that resets whether you used it or not. Credits here are bought once and do not expire, so a quiet month costs nothing and a backlog run does not need an upgrade.

Your audio is not sent to a third-party modelTranscription runs on our own GPUs in our own private cloud. Nothing is forwarded to OpenAI or any other vendor's API, which is usually the blocking question when the recordings are customer calls or unreleased material.

One job, every formattxt, json, srt, vtt and docx all come from the same job id. Re-submitting a file per format is the most common way teams pay several times for one transcription.

Built to be retriedIdempotency-Key means an automation platform's automatic retry returns the original job instead of billing a second one. Every no-code platform retries; most transcription APIs charge you for it.

Build it on

Google Driveshare links are not media URLs — use the OAuth connectorstorage YouTubeauto-captions have no punctuation or speakersvideo platform Amazon S3presigned URLs expire — grant a scoped role for standing pipelinesstorage n8nWait node works but pins a worker — split submit and poll at volumeself-hosted automation

Try the quality free, then wire it up

Your first transcript in the web app is free, any length, no card — that is how to check accuracy on your own audio before writing any code. The API itself has no free tier: a key is self-serve once your account has credit ($50 minimum, spendable on transcription, and it does not expire). $8 per 1,000 minutes — about $0.48 an audio hour — and credits never expire.

Transcribe a file free →Create an API key API reference