Introducing Audio Transcription on the Cuckoo Portal: Your Words, Transformed

Clear records matter—whether you’re following up on a team call, drafting podcast show notes, or collecting research interviews. At Cuckoo Network, we're continuously building tools to empower creators and builders. That's why we're thrilled to announce that starting today, the Cuckoo Portal now lets you turn audio files into neatly formatted text in just a few clicks.

What You Can Do with Audio Transcription

Our new feature is designed to be both powerful and user-friendly, streamlining your workflow from start to finish.

Drag-and-Drop Uploads: Getting started is as simple as dragging your audio file and dropping it into the portal. We support a wide range of common formats, including MP3, WAV, M4A, and several others, ensuring you can work with the files you already have.

Fast, Multilingual Speech-to-Text: At the heart of our transcription service is OpenAI's Whisper, a state-of-the-art model trained on 680,000 hours of diverse audio. This allows for robust performance across various languages, accents, and dialects, delivering high accuracy for your recordings.

Two Outputs, One Pass: To cater to different needs, we provide two versions of your transcript simultaneously. You'll receive the raw, unfiltered machine transcript alongside an AI-enhanced version with polished punctuation and formatting. This is perfect for quick reviews or for content that's ready to be published directly.

On-Chain Payment: In the spirit of a transparent and decentralized ecosystem, each transcription job costs a flat rate of 18 CAI tokens. Your current CAI balance is always visible in the top-right corner of the portal, so you're always in control.

How It Works

We've made the process incredibly straightforward:

1. Navigate to “Audio Transcription” in the left sidebar of the Cuckoo Portal.
2. Upload your file by either dragging it into the designated box or clicking to select it from your computer.
3. Wait a few moments as the transcription process begins automatically.
4. Copy or download the cleaned-up text for your notes, blog, dataset, or any other use case.

Why We Built This

This new feature is a direct response to the needs of our growing community.

Smoother Creator Workflows: Many of you are already leveraging Cuckoo for AI-generated art and chat agents. Accurate transcripts make it easier than ever to repurpose spoken content into various formats, such as subtitles for videos, search-friendly articles, or labeled training data for your own AI models.

Data You Control: We take your privacy seriously. Your audio files never leave our infrastructure, except for processing through Whisper’s API. The results of your transcription are displayed only within your portal session and are never shared.

A Simple Token Economy: By pricing this service in CAI, we maintain a transparent and straightforward cost structure that aligns the use of our platform with the overall activity of the network.

Looking Ahead

We're just getting started. Here are a few of the enhancements we're already exploring:

• Batch uploads for handling large research projects and extensive audio archives.
• Speaker diarisation to distinguish between and label different speakers in a single recording.
• Direct export to Cuckoo Chat, allowing you to instantly start a Q&A session with your transcribed recordings.

Do you have other ideas or features you'd like to see? We invite you to share your suggestions in the #feature-requests channel on our Discord.

Ready to give it a try? Head over to https://cuckoo.network/transcribe or the Audio Transcription tab in the Cuckoo Portal and run your first file. As always, thank you for being a part of the Cuckoo Network and for helping us build a more useful and creative ecosystem for everyone.