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. 

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! 

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. 

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. 

AI vs Human Transcription: the Nitty-Gritty

In a recent post, we discussed what we call “Forensic Transcription”––a term we use not to indicate transcription work relating to crime investigation, but to refer to our specific method here at ATC of approaching each project we undertake with a meticulous, detail-oriented attitude. This approach has earned us our reputation as a top transcription service, with a focus on accuracy above all that we continue to stake our reputation on. We have never strayed from our guarantee of at least 99% accuracy or no charge, and we don’t ever intend to. 

But what really is “forensic transcription”, and why isn’t AI capable of it? After all, we don’t deny that AI technology has come a long way, even in just the past year. AI vs human transcription is a hot topic right now. AI transcription services abound––a simple Google search pulls up thousands of them, many of which boast low prices, incredibly fast turnaround, and even free trials. So what’s the missing link? Why hasn’t AI taken over the transcription market completely?

a robot hand and a human hand reach towards each other, not quite touching, meant to represent AI vs human transcription
Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

The answer is simple: accuracy. While the majority of the AI transcription services you might pull up in a search will boast on cost and speed, accuracy is not a term so often bandied about. AI has grown more accurate as it has continued to develop, particularly if you’re working with broadcast-quality audio, crystal-clear speech, and simple terms. 

But rarely are recordings so cut-and-dry. The moment you add in, say, accents, foreign language excerpts, false starts, overlapping dialogue, technical jargon, or lower quality audio––all things that we can confidently say after over 50 years of transcription are pretty commonplace––AI struggles. As the tech currently stands in the struggle of AI vs human transcription, it still takes human brainpower to work through the complexities and nuances of most audio, and this kind of meticulous accuracy becomes particularly important depending on the project being transcribed.

Where AI transcription may work for a funny YouTube video about adding Mentos to Pepsi, where a lower level of accuracy is acceptable and the main focus of the content is in the visuals, it does not work well for a serious oral history recording from decades ago pertaining to a culturally significant topic, where foreign language excerpts, accents, audio quality, and specific terminology will all cause AI to falter. Projects of an academic, historical, or culturally important nature require the sensitivity and care of humans––and it is this truth that has guided us in our “forensic” approach to transcription, and will continue to guide us through projects to come, no matter the challenges. 

Accents, Artificial Intelligence and Humans.

Accents. There are an estimated 30 accents that span the landscape of the United States. Tell me, if we as humans have a hard enough time parsing out the dropped “Rs” in words from a Bostonian (please note we’re a bunch of Bostonians here at ATC), how is Artificial Intelligence (AI) ready and able to do so? It isn’t!

There’s a reason we continue to be used as a human test-case against AI.

Is the adaptability of artificial intelligence’s deep learning modules able to discern all of these accents, colloquialisms, and dialects the same as the adaptability of a human team of transcriptionists? We think not. Who better to transcribe that Bostonian than fellow Bostonians? Who better to comprehend the words and colloquialisms from recordings of oral histories from folks in New Orleans (for instance) than people from New Orleans? We’ve been custom-matching client content to every human transcriptionist for 55 years, and we’ll keep doing so. We guarantee it!

Lastly, I know when I talk to the AI of my phone asking it one question or another, inevitably, it gets something wrong every time. And mind you, I’m somehow one of those Bostonians who no one ever believes is actually a Bostonian. Yet, it still has a hard time understanding me. Go figure.

At the Audio Transcription Center, nothing about our intelligence is artificial!

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! 

Fast Isn’t Meaningful if a Transcript isn’t Accurate

There’s a reason the top academic institutions, government agencies, financial organizations, and market research firms continue to call on the Audio Transcription Center for their most challenging projects.

Our clients want their transcripts fast, but understand the importance of balancing speed with the delivery of a 99% accurate transcript.

Fast isn’t meaningful if a transcript isn’t accurate.

Accuracy is a necessity, and they know they’ll always get the most out of the diverse and knowledgeable transcriptionists who are custom-matched to each project. These awesome people bring their varied and unique experiences to each recording they’re transcribing. This allows for better understanding of the content, a more accurate transcript, and less time reviewing and fixing errors, saving time and dollars.

“I am so pleased with the transcriptions your people have done. This is a very large project, and I’ve only this week gotten to review the transcriptions. They are amazingly accurate, seemingly even looking up names to get them right.”

-An ATC client

At the Audio Transcription Center, our transcripts may be 99% accurate, but they’ll also always be unconditionally 100% guaranteed or no charge – no ifs, ands or buts.

Michael Sesling, Vice President

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?”

The Hidden Costs of “Cheap” Transcription Services

The Hidden Costs of Cheap Transcription Services - Audio Transcription Center Blog

Before you select a transcription service, ask yourself “what are my priorities?” Cheap transcription services may be tempting as a way to save money but beware: low rates do not automatically mean low total cost. These are some of the many traps and hidden costs you may find:

Continue reading “The Hidden Costs of “Cheap” Transcription Services”