The Good and Bad of Transcription

The official definition of transcription is: "A written or printed version of something; a transcript."

When smartphones added transcription to their services, it was truly a game changer. Voicemail no longer had to be listened to, they could now be read. Dictation no longer required a person listening to each word and then translating the spoken words into text. Now all this was done automatically.

So this is what is very good about transcription, it saves time, it saves energy and allows us to shift from listening to reading.

There are two areas where even the best automated transcription services are lacking. The first is word recognition. The typical systems get 80% of the words right about 80% of the time. The problem is the remaining 20%. Even one word that isn't transcribed correctly can make an otherwise amazing document appear "sloppy" through the lack of credibility of the system transcribing the words.

The second area where these systems have an opportunity for improvement is with punctuation. The transcription seems like free form text because it is unless you know the transcription punctuation commands. To learn more about these commands visit our blog post on this subject.

This is why anything that offers transcription needs to have a way to review and edit it in the system.

In the BabbleStash app, every spoken word is automatically transcribed. Since we know there will be periodic errors in transcribing the spoken words, we provide a tool within the app to correct the word transcriptions and punctuation.

If you have around 200 recordings and you do not want to take the time to fix them all, BabbleStash has a service to help you make the corrections.

After the recordings are all exported from the Stash, we offer you several options:

1. Go through each recording word by word to make sure the spoken words were properly transcribed.

2. Go through the spoken words and also fix the grammar so the transcriptions can be easily read.

3. Rush versions of the above.

We offer the services based on time of the audio recordings and/or the number of questions answered:

Up to 4 hours of audio and up to 240 questions answered.

Up to 6 hours of audio and up to 360 questions answered;

Up to 8 hours of audio and up to 480 questions answered; and

Up to 10 hours of audio and up to 600 questions answered.

Let us know what you think. Download the BabbleStash app today!