Category: Inside ATC

The Inside ATC collection features blogs that we’ve written pertaining to behind-the-scenes topics of our work here at the Audio Transcription Center. These topics include confidentiality, transcription formatting, audio recording, and so much more.

Inside ATC, Transcription

What should you expect during an initial sales call with ATC? 

It’s important to keep in mind that this process might not be right for everyone. If you have a smaller project, with a handful of hours to be transcribed, a full sales call might not be necessary to get you a quick estimate and begin work on your project. Fill out the form on our “Get A Quote” page and we’ll follow up with you within 24 business hours.

Sales calls can often be a choppy, uncomfortable, and stressful situation. A lot of the time you may just want one answer, how much? But, you’re stuck in this sales call focused on one thing, a salesperson trying hard to sell you their product or service. Personally, we know we don’t like that approach and that approach isn’t what we take at the Audio Transcription Center. That approach isn’t what has kept us in business since 1966.  

At the Audio Transcription Center, we want to make this process as easy and smooth as possible for you. In our initial correspondence via email (if you’ve completed our Get A Quote form) or on the phone (as we do often prefer to return a phone call), we set up a time with you to meet with our VP, Michael Sesling, and potentially another member of our team. You’ll receive a meeting agenda and Zoom link prior to our call so you can feel well prepared, and we always do our best to stay within the time constraints that we all have blocked off. We respect you and your availability and know your time is valuable.  

Our meeting agenda is not a strict plan, but rather a guideline to help make sure we hit on all the important points, to help the flow of conversation, and to help you feel ready for our call. Our meeting agenda includes:  

Introductions: Everyone present will introduce themselves. Michael, our VP, will give a brief history of the Audio Transcription Center, and you can give a brief history of your organization and project.  

Discussion: We’ll discuss the oral histories or content you want to be transcribed. This is the part of the call where we usually end up with more questions than answers 🙂 We will discuss ATC’s process including how we receive audio files, what happens when they’re received, what happens once they are transcribed, and what you can expect at delivery. This is also a time to discuss any other questions, concerns, or issues you may want to talk about in detail such as security, confidentiality, or accuracy.  

Funding: It is always helpful for us to know if you have secured funding, are in the process, or are still looking for funding. This will help us be able to assess and establish the urgency or timeline of your project, while also giving us an opportunity to help you depending on what various stage of the funding process you are in.  

Our sales call is a very easy going, laid back process where Michael welcomes you into his home (literally as he works from home). We aim to make you feel as comfortable as possible and make sure you walk away having a full understanding of our process. It’s a time for any questions you may have and for seeking clarification.

Stay tuned next month to read about what information you, as a prospective client, should have ready for a sales call with ATC. 

Inside ATC, Transcription

Tough Transcripts: ATC & Problem-Solving

By now, you’ve probably heard us talk quite a bit about accuracy: how important accuracy is to us, how important accuracy is to our clients, and how our reputation is staked on our extremely high level of accuracy. But there’s more to ATC than just our accuracy. For today’s blog we thought we’d discuss another cornerstone trait of our business and our team: problem solving. 

a solved rubix cube sits on a plain background, representing the Audio Transcription Center's ability to problem-solve when it comes to difficult transcription projects.
Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán on Pexels.com

Like many businesses before us (and surely many that will come after), we pride ourselves at ATC on our problem-solving abilities. Different industries have different arrays of issues that they face on a daily basis. For instance, at your favorite coffee shop, the problem-solving skills may orient themselves towards handling irritable morning commuters, keeping the different milks stocked and syrups organized, etc. In many ways, we’re no different! Transcription service comes with its own set of unique problems, and we’re ready to handle them.

Maybe we’re biased (ok, we definitely are), but we feel that our team is uniquely equipped for solving the hiccups that come up on an everyday basis. The diversity of our remote team of transcriptionists means that an extremely wide variety of personal interests, degrees, and fields of knowledge are represented, giving us an arsenal of varied expertise that means that we can tackle anything our clients throw at us. And throw they do––whether it’s technical issues relating to uploading and downloading files, difficult, aged audio recordings, hyper-specific grammar and formatting requirements, migrating and digitizing content from old and obsolete pieces of technology, translating and transcribing foreign language audio, and so, so much more, we’ve learned and adapted to handling it all, and handling it fast. We have always relied on our team to use their collective brainpower to solve any problem that comes our way. And that trust has carried us through over 50 years of business. 

So, when you’ve got an old, scratchy recording, or a collection of dusty tapes full of overlapping dialogue, or an oral history in a Spanish dialect, or any problem relating to transcription you can think of, who you gonna call? 

ATC! 

Inside ATC, Tips & Tricks

The Art of Questioning: Simple Tips for Conducting Interviews

Interviews are something we’re all too familiar with here at ATC: they make up a huge portion of the audio we transcribe, and as such, we’ve become accustomed to the common forms, techniques, banalities, and yes––even the (occasional) blunders. While it’s only natural for every interview to have its highs and lows, we thought it may be useful to compile a short list of simple tips and tricks for conducting interviews that we’ve learned over our decades of work with oral historians, journalists, authors, and more. We certainly didn’t invent these principles, as we’re not the professionals in this field. Instead, these are the things we’ve gleaned from the experts that we feel are some of the cornerstones to a good interview––and we hope that those of you newer to interviewing get some use from them!

two women sit next to one another with microphones, conducting interviews for a talk show or podcast.
Photo by George Milton on Pexels.com
  1. Planning & The Goldilocks Principle

    One of the most important strategies for conducting an effective interview is preparation. It’s vital to put some planning and forethought into the interview––from both the interviewer and the interviewee––so that both parties feel that they’ve had a chance to fairly represent themselves, had enough time to speak, and had the opportunity to put their best foot forward and relay their desired meanings. But be warned; there is such a thing as too much planning. While it’s common courtesy to provide your interviewee with a list of questions (or, at the least, important talking points) ahead of time, there’s no need to get too specific. Part of the magic of a good interview is the natural flow––and sometimes getting a little off-topic or telling an unplanned anecdote can end up provoking the most stimulating part of the conversation. To avoid stifling an engaging exchange, make sure to plan just enough, but don’t overdo it. Provide your subject with a list of topics or questions, but avoid steering their answers in a specific direction or leading the witness, or you may end up with pedestrian, run-of-the-mill answers that make for a boring interview.

  2. Guidance & Support

    Another aspect of interviewing that often goes overlooked is the importance of support. When we transcribe an interview verbatim––meaning with every “um,” “ah,” “hm,” and false start included––one of the most notable elements of the finished transcript is the volume of verbal supportive cues given. While we as transcriptionists can’t observe the nonverbal encouragement that may be given by an interviewer (nodding, etc), we can observe the verbal ones, and we see firsthand the difference they make in the interviewing process. Though they may create more work for us as the transcriptionists, more verbal supporting cues (in the form of interjections) help interviewees respond better to questions––whether that means further elaboration of a previously expressed thought or the courage to tackle a difficult topic that perhaps they weren’t planning on getting into in depth. While it can seem repetitive to you as the interviewer, nodding along and offering small verbal interjections (“Ah,” “I see,” “Mm,” “Okay”) can really bolster the interviewee and make for a more comfortable rapport. Remember, though, if your recording contains a lot of supportive interjections, it can make transcription harder (particularly for AI), so look for a transcription service that can handle difficult audio––like us! And, to save yourself the trouble of worrying about verbal tics and cues while you’re trying to interview, request a modified verbatim transcript, where we transcribe all of the important content in the conversation and omit the verbal cues and stutters.


  3. Review, Review, Review

    Our last tip may be one we have a vested interest in, but it’s no less important for it: reviewing your interview. Whether you’re going to have your interview transcribed or not, it’s important to review it either in audio or text form to give you the best understanding of the effectiveness of your questions, your tone, your supportive cues, minute details of wording, and more. We recommend reviewing your interview at least a full day after it has taken place, so you can have some cognitive distance from your perceived ideas about the conversation and analyze your questions and your interviewee’s responses more accurately. This review process helps you understand what led to the most groundbreaking moments in the interview, or, conversely, where something might have gone a little awry. As always, if you need a transcript of any interview with an unbeatable level of accuracy, well, you know where to find us!

While these three tips for conducting interviews may seem simple and self-explanatory on the surface, we’ve found that really honing on them results in better, more engaging interviews every time––as well as more interesting transcripts for us! Whether you’re conducting interviews for an oral history, a memoir, an academic purpose, or even an open role at your workplace, these three tips will help guide you towards your ideal interview––and we wish you the best of luck!

Inside ATC, Transcription

The Importance of a Customized Transcript

There are so many things that we customize in our lives, from things as big in scope as the interiors of our homes to things as minute as our shower playlists. But when it comes to transcription, the concept of a customized transcript––matching the client’s content to a transcriptionist with knowledge or background in the topic––is still novel. We don’t know of any other transcription services that utilize this method besides ourselves, probably because it takes a larger, more diverse team, not to mention that the team must be human (not computer AI) and therefore will come with a higher cost to maintain. But customizing your transcript by selecting the perfect transcriptionist for the job has always been worth it to us––because it’s intimately tied to our reputation for accuracy. 

workplace of modern artist with keyboard representing the Audio Transcription Center's ability to provide a customized transcript for each client
Photo by Skylar Kang on Pexels.com

When we choose a transcriptionist (or transcriptionists) to work on the audio you provide us, we have a lot of talent to choose from. Our remote team is spread throughout the nation, with a wide variety of backgrounds. Everything from their personal lives to their interests are different, but what ties our team together is their education and their exacting attention to detail. 

When a client presents a new project for us at ATC, one of the most important parts in the process of us delivering them an incredibly accurate, perfectly-formatted customized transcript actually happens at the very beginning. The questions that we ask up front––questions about what the project is about, the contents of the audio files, the client’s particular needs, and the time frame in which they need the transcripts delivered––help us determine what is arguably the most important part in our entire work process: which transcriptionist or transcriptionists will be handling your audio! 

We choose transcriptionists based on every project, and every project is unique, even if it seems similar at a glance to something we’ve worked on before. The speakers, the accents, and the nuances of the dialogue in each recording are all crucial pieces of the customization puzzle, and matching content to the right transcriptionist is at the heart of our ability to provide a guarantee of 99% accuracy at a minimum. After all, who better to transcribe audio with a thick Boston accent than a Bostonian, or to transcribe a lecture on Torah education by Elie Wiesel than someone with a Jewish background? While these may not be details that other services take into account, we believe at ATC that custom-matching your content to the person best equipped to understand all the subtle gradations of it is the key to providing each and every client with a customized transcript that we can be proud of, every time. 

Inside ATC, Transcription

Strict, Structured, & Stringent: The Rules of Transcription Formatting

One of the most common workplace “culture shocks” that we see from applicants looking to work with us at ATC is over our transcription formatting. Our Style Guidelines document that we send to every new transcriptionist we bring on the team is a whopping 45 pages long, full of obscure punctuation rules, hyper-specific grammar guidelines, and nitty-gritty details on anything that our transcriptionists might come across in any audio that we send them. But the one question we don’t often have the opportunity to address is a simple one: why? 

a woman in headphones sits at a desk in front of a computer displaying audio files for transcription formatting

Well, the short answer is: it’s complicated. We put together each and every rule in our Style Guidelines document for a reason––none of them are there randomly, or just to purposefully cause confusion and create extra work (although they do often serve that purpose too). Transcription formatting has to be specific for a number of reasons, but chief among them is that a transcript needs to be above all readable and easy to follow. When you think about the purpose of transcripts, you’ll see why that’s the case: whether to set down in words a vital oral history, make scannable a lecture given by an important historical or cultural figure, or to simply create readable, captioned audio for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing communities, there are countless reasons that transcriptions play a fundamental role in various parts of society––and countless more reasons that they must be cleanly formatted for readability and coherence. 

Consider this example: if you’ve read our recent Client Spotlight blogs, you know that we had the immense honor of working to transcribe 180 lectures from Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel for the digitization of the Elie Wiesel Living Archive at 92NY. You can imagine the kind of care and sensitivity that goes into transcribing such a vast amount of knowledge from a person that has a critical significance to communities around the world both historical and religious. If we were to have transcribed those lectures without the formatting rules in our Style Guidelines in place, what might that have looked like? One lecture formatted this way, another one formatted that way, perhaps another formatted not at all––just words on a page with no speaker attributions, no timestamps, no method of determining who said what, when, and where. Thousands of students, not to mention academic professionals, across the globe might cite this transcription work in their research papers or theses, and they might attribute a quote to Elie Wiesel that was actually spoken by an interviewer, or a friend, or even a member of an oppressive power structure. They may think that a lecture they read was transcribed verbatim when it was not; they may even form opinions based on transcripts that are a little off at best, or dangerously misleading at worst. 

This is just one example of many that show the importance of a strict formatting structure in transcription. We’ve also transcribed multiple Presidential oral histories, as well as oral histories from the House of Representatives, the Federal Reserve System, and many of the leading academic and archival centers in the country. To misstep on our transcription work for any of these organizations––or any of our clients in general––could have a ripple effect that we take extremely seriously. To transcribe is to present a history, to help create a history, and that’s an act that we can never take lightly. 

There’s so much more we could say about our in-house formatting guidelines; after all, there’s a novella’s worth of them, and we recognize (and sympathize!) with applicants hoping to work with us or any newly minted transcriptionists anywhere trying to learn the ropes. It isn’t easy––but then again, things that are important rarely are. At the end of the day, we trust our incredibly talented transcription team to care about all the little details––down to every em dash––because they know that they’re making history along the way. 

Inside ATC, Transcription

Confidentiality IS a no-brainer!

Confidentiality IS a no-brainer - ATC Blog

Oy, the paperwork, the legalese, the “CYA” that’s now REQUIRED when running a transcription service…or any type of service, it seems.  It’s truly never-ending, and we spend hours upon hours reviewing agreements of all kinds with major institutions while they perform risk assessments of ATC’s downtown Boston office space.  Our founder, owner, and president Sandy’s favorite is showing off his circa 1940s Brownie box camera that sits perched on a high shelf in his office impersonating part of our state-of-the-art video security system.  He was thrilled the day one of the younger risk assessment people actually thought it WAS part of the security system.  What’s the reason for all of this, you may ask? It’s the “confidentiality conundrum” that truly isn’t a conundrum…a confidentiality agreement is a no-brainer.  So…does a confidentiality agreement automatically guarantee confidentiality?

Continue reading “Confidentiality IS a no-brainer!” →

Inside ATC

Rain, sleet, or “Snowpocalypse,” ATC is here for all your transcription needs!

(Blizzard of ’78 picture By David L. Ryan/Globe Staff/file 1978)

Winter Storm Nemo, also known as “Snowpocalypse,” is arriving in New England, but team ATC is ready to make sure your audio and video content aren’t buried beneath the snowdrifts, or blown away in the blizzard-like winds.

The Blizzard of 1978 caught many people by surprise, and Boston was shut down for days afterwards

Continue reading “Rain, sleet, or “Snowpocalypse,” ATC is here for all your transcription needs!” →

Inside ATC, Transcription

Our Transcriptionists: Part of the 47% Honor Roll!

Our Transcriptionists - Audio Transcription Center Blog

What do you do with people who have a keen sense of hearing, ridiculously fast fingers, one hell of an accurate mind, but prefer not to interact with the public?

What do you do with people who prefer to interact with words and ideas instead?

What do you do with people who prefer a job that offers near instant gratification?

What do you do with people who prefer producing high quality transcripts out of a poor audio recording?

What do you do with people who prefer leaving their work at the office?

What do you do with people who get their jollies by beating unrealistic deadlines?

Since 1966 we’ve found a home for these anomalies of the working world, and we’ve been able to build our highly educatedand culturally diverse team of transcriptionistsfrom this truly amazing group of oddballs.

Give the Audio Transcription Center a try, and see the difference it makes in the accuracy of your transcripts and the speed of your work flow.  (As well as helping to bring down the unemployment rate…)

 
Lastly, please remember to VOTE November 6, 2012! 

Michael Sesling
Director
michael@audiotranscriptioncenter.com

Sandy Poritzky
Owner/President
sandy@audiotranscriptioncenter.com

Beating unreasonable deadlines since 1966!
Never a charge for RUSH service!