Someone who takes notes with a voice recorder will discover that manual transcription services are expensive, and doing the transcription yourself usually defeats the point of using a voice recorder if they have little free time. The solution is to use voice recognition software to cut down on the work. The problem is accuracy, and there are quite a few products on the market. Find the best-automated transcription program to save money and achieve accuracy.
A great example of the problem is transcribing highly technical terms. One of the reasons why medical transcriptionists are still common is because they understand the meaning of various drugs as well as their syntactical use. It might be hard for a typical voice recognition software to be aware of the specific meaning of a drug term. Transcription software has to match the conventions of a profession in order to be accurate.
This is really true for most professions as many contain technical jargon. Most professions have their own conventions if they create documents frequently. An engineer might use terms and a writing style or a format that is typical of a trade. Just as language differs according to regional dialects, professions sometimes use a variant of English that would sound foreign to someone outside the profession.
Another problem with software is that they require a clear voice using a standard dialect in order to work effectively. AI is getting smarter and can recognize a greater variety of speech patterns but still is not accurate. If a speaker is not being clear, then the words might register incorrectly. Some audio transcripts are very poor and require several steps to clarify.
Best-automated transcription actually have sophisticated ways to deal with the problem. The first is that they use fairly powerful software to decode a transcript even if the speech is not perfect. The second step is to hire freelancers to verify the transcript and to fill in the blanks. The last step is to use manual transcription for snippets that cannot be discerned by software.
Although these services still use transcribers, often the complete audio is broken into pieces so that personal privacy and the integrity of ideas are largely protected. Using human verification ensures accuracy, which can be essential for many customers. It can even be more accurate than using a single transcriptionist because the audio is checked by both AI and more than one human reviewer.
