Our Top 10 Advantages of Using Transcription Services
When it comes to transcribing spoken audio or video files, there are only three practical options:
- Transcribe it in-house (yourself or by someone in your company or organisation)
- Utilise a machine-based AI transcription service
- Outsource the transcription to a professional transcription company
Accurate transcription is an essential aspect of many industries such as medical practices, law firms and research organisations, as well as businesses and individuals conducting various kinds of studies and interviews. A high degree of accuracy is also important for gaining a comprehensive view and understanding of your recorded activities, so it’s vital to have the right tools for the job. Let’s consider these three options in a little more detail.
In-House Transcription
If you have the expertise, the tools, and the spare time available to accurately transcribe your audio files yourself, then this is a very viable option. However, it’s likely that you’ll usually be too busy getting on with your main work activities and won’t have time to do this manual and time-consuming task. You may choose to employ staff that can take on board your transcription projects, but when you consider the costs of equipment, training, staff wages and benefits, it can become an expensive overhead to have an in-house dedicated audio transcription department that may not be active for all of their available working hours.
Machine-based AI Transcription Services
With the recent advancements in speech recognition technology, AI transcription services are available that leverage the tremendous speed at which a machine can ‘listen’ to audio or video files and turn the spoken word into text. These have the advantage of being fairly low-cost, and some can also differentiate between different speakers with distinct voices.
While this may sound promising, accuracy issues can negatively impact your business if you rely purely on the machine’s output. Accuracy is only claimed to be around 80% even for clear speakers, and this drops dramatically with background noises, when multiple speakers are involved, or when accents and colloquial phrases are used. The output will also most likely not be in the format you require so this will need editing.
Be aware that the AI output must be fully proofread whilst listening to the original recording, checking and correcting all errors, and ensuring that all speech is assigned to the correct speaker. Overlap, where the start of one person’s speech is assigned to the previous speaker, and vice-versa, is all too common in AI transcripts. This whole process will always take up more time and may negate any cost savings you had hoped for due to the time spent fixing AI generated transcripts.
For more information on AI transcription, check out our blog ‘Will Speech-to-Text Apps Ever Replace Human Transcription?’
Outsourcing to a Professional Transcription Company
The third option is to employ a reputable transcription company with a team of experienced and highly skilled professional transcribers whose daily job is transcribing audio and video files for clients across many industries. These fully trained individuals will be experts at researching the relevant topics and use the most appropriate software and hardware to provide accurate and properly formatted documents according to your specifications. The huge benefit to your budget is that you only pay as and when you need this service for an accurate and ready-to-use transcript, in the format you have requested.
How to Choose
Considering the above, we believe the most cost-effective and efficient option is to outsource your transcription projects to a reliable professional transcription company, whose well-trained personnel are fully equipped to transcribe your spoken audio and video files accurately.
To help you understand the benefits of outsourcing your transcription projects, here are ten advantages for you to consider to help make your decision easier.
1. You Save Money
Cost-saving is at the heart of every business and organisation and is also important to all of us as individuals. Nobody wants to spend any more than they need to. Employing full-time staff in-house is far more costly than outsourcing your transcription projects. You’ll have to pay for wages, benefits, overtime, equipment and training with an in-house team. This is where AI transcription initially appears to be an attractive offer. A machine-based transcript can be returned to you within the hour at a relatively low cost.
However, as mentioned previously, this output cannot be relied upon and you will need to spend countless hours verifying the content and fixing it, which will take more staff hours than you expect and increase costs. Alternatively, by outsourcing to a professional transcription company, you only pay for transcription services as and when required for a fully proofread and ready to use transcript.
2. You Have Access to Skilled Staff
Professional transcribers with subject matter expertise can accurately transcribe specialised content, such as medical or legal terminology, technical jargon, or industry-specific language. They are well-skilled in researching the current topic and can express information in formats relevant to the industry or your project requirements. AI will likely trip up when it comes across any technical terms and phrases, reducing your accuracy levels, which will take time to check and amend as required. Therefore, experienced human transcribers are the best option when you need accurate transcripts.
3. Flexibility
Experienced transcribers know all there is about transcription, preventing inaccuracies and delays in delivery, and there are specialists for every field so that your transcription project is handled by the transcriber most suited to it. Professional transcription services can also accommodate varying turnaround times and volume requirements, providing flexibility to meet tight deadlines or fluctuating transcription needs. In addition, when you have different formatting requirements depending on the type of content or research you are conducting, a professional transcription company will create templates so that your final transcript will be consistent with all others in the same project group.
4. Outsourcing Frees Up Your Workers
Instead of taking one of your staff members away from their regular duties, you can outsource your transcription needs to a professional company whose transcribers do this kind of work all day every day. This frees up your staff, giving them time to concentrate fully on doing what they do best, rather than having the added burden of transcribing data. Since transcription requires full concentration to ensure accuracy, having someone who can give special attention to the service is important. As explained in point 1, it can be a false economy to use machine-based AI transcription when the output generated requires one of your workers to ensure everything is correct before it can be used. With a professional human transcription company, all the proofreading and error-checking has already been done for you.
5. Guaranteed Superior Quality
Although machine-based AI transcription is fast, its accuracy is reportedly only 80% at best, depending on the audio quality and other factors like the number of speakers, accents, and background noise. Thanks to well-developed techniques and access to the right tools and expertise, a professional transcription company can provide you with a guaranteed transcription accuracy of at least 99%, especially when backed up by a solid Quality Control department.
6. Timely and Customised Delivery
When you outsource your transcription needs to a professional transcription company, you can be assigned a specialised project manager to ensure delivery of the finished transcript within the timescale you require. The output of your transcribed audio can take many forms from a simple document layout to one with timestamps, speaker labels, and formatted columns or tables. If you choose machine-based AI transcription, the output must be examined and reformatted, taking up more of your valuable time and incurring extra cost. A professional transcription company will ensure that each project is delivered on time in whichever format you require, consistently across the whole project, so that the output is fit for purpose.
7. Verbatim-Level Content
Audio and video content often contain non-verbal visual cues and sounds, such as nodding, laughing, crying, sniffing, etc. Even though speech recognition tools are advancing to the point where they can now recognise sounds like laughter and applause, many other non-verbal cues are missed entirely by AI transcription, especially when transcribing visual content, resulting in an incomplete view of the subject matter. Experienced professional transcribers are skilled at producing transcripts that include or exclude this additional content depending on your requirements on a project-by-project basis.
8. Reliability
AI-based transcription does not provide any proofreading to check for errors or inconsistencies. It is essentially a ‘best guess’ word-for-word transcript so that what it hears is what you get. Often words or small groups of words are repeated whilst a person is thinking of what they’re about to say next, or they take long pauses between two words of the same sentence. An AI transcript is frequently full of these ‘filler words’ or ‘filler phrases’ and incomplete sentences, which must be manually edited to present meaningful transcripts. Experienced transcribers have well-trained ears and eyes for listening and proofreading transcripts, and they are experts at removing exactly the right amount of filler words whilst keeping true to the essence and mannerisms of the words being spoken, depending on the project requirements. A reputable professional transcription company will also have a fully skilled Quality Control department to ensure accuracy and consistency across all your transcription projects.
9. Support
Due to the processes used, machine-based AI transcription does not currently offer any support for fixing errors or answering questions about transcripts it has performed. You cannot ask an AI transcription tool why it produced a particular type of output or to change certain sections. These must all be done manually in-house after receiving the transcribed content. On the other hand, professional transcription services typically offer customer support to address any questions or concerns. They assist and ensure adherence to your requirements throughout the transcription process.
10. Confidentiality
Confidentiality and data security measures are essential to protect sensitive information contained in audio or video files. With a machine-based AI transcription tool that is not physically on your premises, you cannot guarantee the security of data uploaded to its servers, especially if those servers are located outside of the jurisdiction of your own country. A reputable professional transcription company will comply fully with all data protection regulations, ensuring that its transcribers follow all security requirements and sign non-disclosure agreements as required.
Who Will You Call?
At McGowan Transcriptions, we’ve been providing high-quality, accurate transcriptions to businesses, organisations and individuals for over 30 wonderful years, and we have a team of highly skilled professional transcribers who daily take on projects from a diverse range of industries. Our customer testimonials speak for themselves, and our dedicated Quality Control team ensures accuracy and consistency across all the projects for our clients. We’re fully compliant with current legislation in accordance with the Data Protection Act, and we’re Cyber Essentials certified.
When you need to outsource your transcription projects, you can be sure that we have the experience, expertise and technology to provide you with the most accurate transcriptions possible for you or your business or organisation. If you would like to know more, please get in touch with the team today.
Call 0800 158 3747 or email office@mcgowantranscriptions.co.uk.
Written by Paul Dyson
June 2024