Head to head
WhoSaidWhat vs. TurboScribe
A consumer transcription app and a parliamentary record system are not the same category of tool. This page walks the five stages between a sitting ending and its record being public, and shows where each one stops.
The short version
Feature comparison
Five stages from the chamber to the public record
The stages are numbered because they are a sequence: each depends on the one before it. A tool that covers stage two leaves stages one, three, four and five to your staff.
The question before every other question
Where do your sittings actually go?
Every other difference on this page matters less than this one. A sitting is not a meeting recording. It is the constitutional record of a legislature, it often contains matters not yet public, and once a copy of it exists somewhere else, it exists somewhere else permanently.
The audio of your sitting is uploaded to servers belonging to someone else, processed under consumer terms of service, and a text file comes back. The transcript returns. The audio does not. A copy sits outside the institution, governed by an agreement no Clerk signed, in an account that usually belongs to one member of staff rather than to Parliament.
WhoSaidWhat is deployed into Parliament's own environment. The audio, the drafts, the corrections and the archive stay where they started. Nothing crosses the boundary except the record Parliament decides to publish — and unpublishing pulls it straight back. Control of the sitting is yours from the first minute of capture, not handed away and returned as a file.
On cost
The cheaper tool is not the cheaper answer
A consumer transcription subscription is inexpensive, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But the subscription was never the significant cost in Hansard production. Staff time is.
A generic transcript arrives needing House formatting, every Member name applied by hand, speeches placed into their Order Paper sections, minutes written separately — and at the end of all that, nothing searchable, nothing public, and nothing a Member can use during a debate.
The comparison that matters is not one subscription against another. It is the number of staff hours between the end of a sitting and a published, searchable record — and whether the audio of that sitting was ever yours to begin with.
Next step
Bring us your hardest sitting.
Send us a session with real crosstalk, real interjections and real local names, and we will show you what comes out the other side — draft, review, publication and archive, on infrastructure that answers to you.