CockatooReviews of cockatoo.com

Not at all worth the money I spent. I live in Medellin, Colombia and sometimes need a translation of voice messages from various people, including my Colombian girlfriend. I speak Spanish fairly well (high intermediate level) and generally can communicate well. With a lot of the audio messages I get, especially from my girlfriend, it is inaccurate and has words missing, sometimes affecting the meaning of the message. I almost always need to send the message to a friend who is a native Colombian and Spanish Professor to translate it. This happens almost every time I try to use it, no matter who the speaker is. I should mention this is for voice translation to a transcript. I decided to update this post. I thought I could just convert a voice message in Spanish into English directly. That has not worked. However, I just did lit two steps, the first a transcription in English and the second a translation of the Spanish text output into English using Google Translate and that seems to work.

I provided an alternate email to this service and I cancelled it via one email, but they continued charging me, and only sending statements to the alternate email. They refused to give my money back, even though I used their service a handful of times during one month, 11 months ago. I politely asked for my money back, and was given back $29, “as a courtesy”. These people can obviously see how many times I used their service, and I didn’t use any of it for those ten months. And they charged me without cause, as I had cancelled my membership. Use any other AI service honestly.

The company is failing to email for subscription renewals. This is not just my impression but other users mention it here in Trustpilot and other places across the internet. I realised today I am paying for their software for around 6 months without realising. I messaged their customer support and escalated the conversation since I saw this was a common practice, practically threatening with negative public reviews that would call this out. The founder got offended by my escalation but apparently the refund is not coming.

This company is untrustworthy. I was suddenly charged $179 with no notifications or communications from Cockatoo. I was not aware I was even on the annual plan. I never received any email correspondence indicating what plan I was on. The only way to contact customer service is by email; I have not yet received any response. This company is sketchy, I recommend taking your business somewhere else or only use their free services.

My initial few transcripts with Cockatoo were impressive. Based on that, I upgraded to the Pro version. After receiving payment, quality immediately and severely declined. Periods of 10-30 seconds are routinely omitted from transcription, rendering output useless. I then have to manually go through and transcribe the recordings myself to make up for the gaps. This renders the whole service entirely useless. I have sent multiple messages to cockatoo with details, including noting specific gaps in transcripts and time stamps. I have received no reply. I am now going to ask for a refund from the bank and escalate documentation to my State's Attorney, as this is a clear case of false advertising and failure to respond to consumers. Beware.

I contacted this company as soon as they took money out of my account to request a refund. I have not heard back despite sending 5 emails. Do not use them no trustworthy in my books

Exporting a SRT file for use in Adobe Premier, the transcription is very out of sync with the audio file that I provided, as in each line is randomly out of sync, so its not just an issue of retiming the sequence. There are is a lot of text out of order also. Some times text is repeated many times. Big waste of time and money. On the plus side the French to English is fairly good, but because I don't speak both languages I will not be able to sync the files one line at a time and make the necessary corrections.