Software for transcription is becoming more popular because of its increased accuracy, low cost, and clever collaboration capabilities.
Multiple fields today all require the use of transcription software, whether it be in marketing, sales, advertising, human resources, law, or education.
Now, if you are a small-scale business, using transcription services will help you to become more aggressive in your efforts to accomplish more.
Giving your staff the resources they require to complete their work will have a good, immediate influence on the expansion of your business.
But it can be challenging to pick a transcription service, which is ideal for your enterprise, due to the variety of transcription services and tools accessible.
You can learn all you need to know about transcription apps and how to pick the finest transcription software—from this in-depth tutorial.
A 9-step guide on how to pick the best transcription software for your small business
The process of turning recordings or real human voices into rich text copies is known as transcription.
The finest transcription technology can record live sessions as well as video and audio data. Additionally, compared to manual translation, a transcription system will generate transcripts significantly more quickly. Imagine minutes and not hours.
Well, here is a run-down of the nine features that you should consider while picking the ideal transcription software for your small-scale business or start-up.
How accurate is the transcription software?
Even with well-recorded sounds, the greatest automated transcription software can still only provide you with roughly 90% accuracy. This is due to the fact that there is still more work to be done in the academic field of automatic speech detection before algorithms can generate findings that are entirely correct.
Nevertheless, the accuracy of the transcription is determined by the ML (Machine Learning) frameworks that the transcribing software employs. For audio that has been properly recorded, the top transcription software such as automatic transcription with AmberScript provides accuracy that is about 90%.
Now, the clarity of your recordings will have a profound impact on the performance of the translation. Certain transcribing programs are more sensitive to background noise than some others. You should submit many video and audio file kinds to the program to try it and to discover which one provides the best reliability for that special subset of recorded quality.
After receiving the automated transcript, you should plan on doing some work to increase the correctness of the transcript on your own. If you really must have 100% precision, you should search for human-powered translation software, which employs a certified transcriptionist to complete the transcript on your behalf. Naturally, this will result in more money than transcribing software with machine power.
How quickly is the transcription program able to produce a transcript?
For a 60-minute-long audio/video file, machine transcripts may normally be completed by transcription programs in roughly 30 minutes. It is undoubtedly a human-powered translation software and will cost extra if the software advertises a 24-hour cycle time.
You should also include the time it will take you to modify the first draught machine transcript once you receive it from the transcribing software, given that computer transcription won’t offer you 100% precision.
How secure is the transcription software?
To find out how the program will handle your submitted video and audio files, carefully check the privacy statement. Do humans ever handle your information, for instance? How long will they retain your stuff on their web server? They develop their ML algorithms based on your data, right? Can you safely remove your information from them? Do they maintain as little data as possible in their data centers?
The best and safest automation tools for streamlining content creation tools will work to reduce the volume of information kept on their systems, for instance by erasing your video and audio files from such servers as soon as they have finished transcribing them.
The reputable ones also provide you full access to this information, enabling you to remove all duplicates of the transcripts from their servers on your own without requiring assistance.
What kinds of formats does the transcription software offer?
You can retrieve your transcribed files as txt and doc files using any transcription program. Then you may modify them more, email them, etc. by opening them in Word Documents, Google Docs, etc.
You can export your transcript in SRT (SubRip Text) and VTT (Voice-to-Text) format as captions or subtitles files using some transcription tools. This enables you to, for instance, create subtitle versions for your Instagram, Facebook, Vimeo, and YouTube films.
Your video will become more accessible as a result, which may occasionally be needed by law. Therefore, you need to particularly seek this feature in the translation program if you want to make subtitle files.
What languages are supported by the transcription software?
Verify that the translation software is compatible with all of the languages you plan to transcribe. Even the best transcribing software may not be accurate across all languages. Therefore, you need to be sure that the transcribing software supports the many languages that you have files in.
Additionally, pay attention to how the transcription system handles local accent variances. The top transcription tools will let you select from a wide range of regional accents.
Will the date stamps be added to your files automatically by the transcription application?
If you have to read the transcript while listening to the audio, dates and times stamps like [00:34:15] can make it easier for you to “browse” the document.
You may decide how frequently you would like these logs to be inserted into the narrative using the finest transcription applications, for example, every 10 seconds or whenever a speaker changes in the recording. They then provide you the option of clicking on these frames to rapidly navigate to that section of the video or audio and hear it, and afterward change the transcript if necessary.
Can you transfer your documents from a device other than your desktops?
You may wish to find out whether the transcription program enables importing documents directly from such file storage sites based on your workflows and whether you utilize any of these services. You can save yourself the trouble of first downloading your files from the services to your computer, then uploading them to the site for transcribing.
In addition to allowing you to submit files via your desktop, the finest transcribing software also offers several options for uploading files via OneDrive, Dropbox, or Google Drive. Certain transcription software allows you to provide a public URL to an internet media file, which the program will then retrieve and translate for you.
Does the transcription software offer you easy editing capabilities for the finished transcript?
As previously indicated, automated transcription is not yet sufficiently developed to provide transcripts that are totally correct.
Even the greatest transcription tools can only guarantee an accuracy rate of 90% for properly captured audio and video data. Thus, you can nearly always anticipate having to work on your end to manually update the transcript.
The ideal transcription program will offer you an intuitive user interface so you may adjust the automated transcript after it has been produced. It will be quite difficult to manually rectify errors if a transcribing program does not offer this. It can take a lot of time!
Does the software integrate a foot pedal and offer keyboard shortcuts for editing transcripts?
You should search for shortcut keys in the text editor. If you need to alter your translations, these are essential for speeding up the process. While editing the text, you can manage the audio/video playing using shortcut keys.
The finest transcription tools allow you to click and double on the machine transcript’s timestamps to get straight to the part of the video or audio file which requires editing. This is yet another time-saving feature.
The incorporation of a control pad with some transcription software is the final feature. This gives you the option to use your foot to control audio or video playing, allowing your hands to type. It’s a tremendous time-saver that experts in transcription employ on a daily basis to expedite their work.
What is the price of the transcription software?
Voice recognition necessitates a significant amount of system resources and is a computationally demanding procedure. As a result, the best transcribing software is often only accessible online and cannot be downloaded. It involves costly server resources, transcribing software typically either charges hourly or has a maximum number of hours that you can record.
Software that claims to offer an unlimited number of transcription hours for a set fee should be avoided. In actuality, they don’t provide you with a limitless number of hours because doing so would cripple them. So be sure to read the small print, especially for phrases like “fair-use” policy.
The top transcribing programs are open and honest about their costs. When they have a modest license price and charge by the hour, you receive the best deal.
Conclusion
We sincerely hope that you found this informational and practical.
Keep in mind that the accuracy of your recordings depends on their quality, and set aside time to edit your audio files.
Use human-powered transcribing services, which are significantly more expensive than transcribing software, if you need transcripts that are 100 percent accurate.