Customization Archives

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.

Software, Transcription

SUPERIOR TRANSCRIPTS REQUIRE MORE THAN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE!

Time and again we’ve tested, measured, and evaluated voice recognition software to determine their highest possible accuracy level. We have determined that with broadcast-quality audio of two well-spoken people, AI can presently reach 96% accuracy, at best. Translated that means approximately 10 errors per page versus our greater than 99% accuracy rate resulting in an average 2.5 errors per page.

So what does AI continue to have difficulty with?

less than broadcast-quality audio
multiple voices (interviews with 2 or more people, multi-person focus groups, etc.)
accents
ambient noise
special vocabulary
grammar
punctuation
spelling

Our production team custom-matches our clients’ subject matter to each transcriptionist’s particular strengths, knowledge, and interests. Our goal is to always make sure that what is said, is what is heard, is what is transcribed. Capturing each recording in a transcript that follows the client’s directions in intricate finite detail.

We have the most selective hiring standards in our industry. Aside from a minimum typing speed of 80 wpm, we only select people who are well-educated, culturally diverse, intellectually curious, and possess excellent grammar skills.

We are able to quickly mobilize a dedicated team for your time-sensitive projects as well as highly confidential work, and we also have a nationwide team available for projects of any size and subject matter.

AT THE AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION CENTER
NOTHING ABOUT OUR INTELLIGENCE IS ARTIFICIAL!

FAQ, Transcription

What Is Verbatim Transcription and When Do You Need It?

What Is Verbatim Transcription and When Do You Need It

When requesting a quote from a transcription service, it’s important to know the level of detail you require. Do you need every single word including filler (“like,” “you know,” etc.)? Do you need every utterance and sound noted? This will help you get an accurate estimate in the short term, and will prevent you from paying twice for the same project in the future.

Continue reading “What Is Verbatim Transcription and When Do You Need It?” →

FAQ, Transcription

Timecodes in Transcription: Types and Uses

Timecodes in Transcription Types and Uses - ATC Blog

Timecodes, also known as timestamps, are inserted into transcripts at specified intervals, providing a marker of where the text is found in a video or audio file.

Timecodes have been traditionally used in video captioning, but are becoming popular for use in panel discussions, legal transcripts, market research, oral history, and podcasts. The placement of timestamps makes it easier for a person to review or listen to a particular moment or conversation within a file.

Continue reading “Timecodes in Transcription: Types and Uses” →

FAQ, Transcription

Transcripts, timecoding, and you

Transcripts timecoding and you - Audio Transcription Center Blog

As the Director of the Audio Transcription Center, I am routinely in meetings with Sandy Poritzky, the owner who started this firm in 1966. Over the course of my 5 years with the firm, I have listened numerous times to Sandy’s arguments for time-coding transcripts and had many an argument about the topic.

“Michael, my boy,” he’ll say, “why don’t we have time-coding as a standard for all client transcripts?” “Sandy, the challenge with time-coding is that there is no standard,” I’ll tell him, and then we’ll get into a debate for the next 35 minutes about time-coding.

In the ensuing battles in his office, Sandy, in his inimitable fashion argued that we need to come up with a standard for time-coding that would be included in all client transcripts. On the counterpoint, in my inimitable fashion, I argued that every client’s needs are so different that there can not be any standard inclusion of time-coding in transcripts.

To be fair, Sandy’s belief is that time-coding should be a standard offering in transcripts, and he understands that every client has very different needs in how time-coding should be included and used in transcription.

Five years later, the battles still linger on, but we now have a conversation with clients about their specific transcription requirements and how time-coding can be a major time-saver in reviewing and editing your transcripts in the long run.

Quite basically, time-coding is beneficial for clients on a few different levels. One way is for clients to be able to sync up their transcripts with their audio/video files, so that visitors to an online oral history project may synchronously watch the video recording and read the transcript.

For instance, have a look at the website of the Kentuckiana Digital Library, which offers their video footage with a synced transcript. As Doug Boyd, Director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries writes in his article, “Achieving the Promise of Oral History in a Digital Age”, published in Donald Ritchie’s The Oxford Handbook of Oral History [Oxford University Press, 2011], “By embedding time-code into the transcript, we enabled time correlation between the transcript and the audio or video, yielding an integrated final product where the components work together…Additionally, we created a customized software solution to more easily (albeit still manually) embed time-code markers into the transcript. The decision was made to embed these markers at one-minute intervals throughout the transcript. The five-minute interval proved to be, still, too much text to scan while trying to determine the specific location of the information being sought in the audio file.”

We also work with numerous production companies that are sending in their video footage prior to editing. These clients actually have us time-coding their transcripts at even shorter intervals, so they can easily and efficiently edit sound bites by reviewing their newly time-coded transcripts.

Additionally, if a client sends in an audio file with with poor quality audio, and we are unable to transcribe a word that is said, we’ll put (inaudible) in place of the unknown word. Time-coding these portions becomes an added feature to help a client easily locate the “inaudible” content in their audio, and review to see if they are able to replace the “inaudible” content with the word that was said.

So in the end, there is no standard need for our clients in how time-codes should be inserted in transcripts, but there certainly is reason to find the time-code formatting that will make reviewing, editing, reading, and watching your content that much simpler.