Digital recording has been used as a means of notetaking for decades. Academics, researchers and students have long since embraced the benefits. These days it is also used by legal professionals, coaches and those who prefer to talk rather than write.
Recording talks and meetings enable you to fully engage with the speaker rather than taking copious notes. The downside, of course, is that the notes still need to be transcribed and this can take hours. That is not a good use of your time!
At the risk of revealing my age, back in the day, when I first went to college, audio typing was done by someone talking into a tiny cassette machine with a loud stop/start button. Sometimes, the tape would get stuck, the transcribing machine would break or the batteries would go flat. Fun times? Definitely not!
Fortunately, things have moved on. Now we all have a recording device on our phones and online meetings can be recorded straight to the cloud. But again, the transcribing still has to be done!
There are numerous apps offering speech recognition for automatic transcription. They are great for those on a budget though they can lack accuracy and struggle with dialects. No matter how advanced our technology gets, artificial intelligence will not be as effective as a human in understanding context. A professional transcriber is best if you need accuracy and personalisation and don’t want to spend hours making amendments.
Automated software has come a long way in recent years, but it’s still not as accurate or reliable as human transcription. Human transcriptionists consistently deliver 99% accuracy, while AI transcription averages between 70-80% accuracy.
A human will understand when you say, “Actually, no, ditch that sentence and say this instead…….” An app will simply type out everything you say and you will need to spend time deleting all those changes and instructions.
FORMATTING
You can give formatting instructions to a human, so your work will be presented to you exactly as you need it to be. The more you work with your transcriber the better the service will become as you build up a relationship with them and they learn to understand your particular words, phrases and formatting preferences.
NOISE
If you have dictated something on the go or in an office, there may be background noise. This can result in other conversations being incorporated into your transcript by an app, they don’t deal with background noise well. A human transcriber will be able to filter this out and focus only on your voice.
SECURITY
Using apps to transcribe your work could leave you vulnerable. Your data will be stored on servers, probably forever, but can you be sure that it’s safe from hackers and complies with GDPR?
With a human transcriber, you will know exactly where your data is stored. When you work with us you get your own private cloud directory where you can upload your audio and download your transcript. Our transcribers are all ICO registered and insured.
If you need a transcribing service or want to learn more about what we offer get in touch for a free no-obligation discovery call https://calendly.com/hello-sam-j/30min or visit our website: https://vawebsitesforyoustaging.co.uk/s-a-m-ltd/
