AMSTERDAM – During his studies, Peter-Paul de Leeuw experienced how frustrating it is to transcribe spoken recordings manually. For English conversations, good software was available that automatically converted speech to text. Not so for the smaller European languages. De Leeuw decided to do it himself.

The result is the transcription service Amberscript. At the end of last year, the service came out on top in a test by journalists’ magazine VillaMedia of five apps that convert Dutch spoken text into the written word. However, the service is not 100% accurate yet.

“With professional audio recordings, it goes up to about 95%,” says De Leeuw. “But recordings via a smartphone in a noisy café are almost useless.” He hopes to overcome the latter by allowing customers to use a microphone. “We’re working on a test right now.”