Transcription Service Blog by Transcription Institute

First and foremost, avoid sending business emails during hoilidays, such as Thanksgiving, Chritstmas, New Year as these are the times when people are not working and therefore, they will not be able to check their emails. With this, it is suggested to avoid launching your email campaigns during these periods.
Second, some surveys claim that the best days to send email is TUE, WED and THU. Mondays are usually busy to catch up with the work and plan the week, and Fridays are usually busy to plan the weekend.br/> As to the best day time to send email, consider mornings or end of the daya in the time zone of the receipient as those are the times when they are not busy with the meetings.

We get a lot of potential customers looking for software that will automatically transcribe their audio or video files for them. But we have to disappoint them. As much as we would love to be able to provide software that automatically transcribes speech, unfortunately the technology to support speech recognition simply hasn't gotten to the point where automatic transcription of audio or video recordings can match, let alone surpass, the accuracy of (good) human transcriptions. One of the reasons for this is that speech is incredibly complex, with variations in accents and enunciation as well as pitch and tone of voice, making it hard to match spoken words to written ones. Human transcribers have the luxury of determining how accurately they're going to transcribe a given audio or video file (or voicemail), for example

- Transcribe verbatim, including "ums" and repetitive phrases such as "like, like," and even enter indications of non-language cues such as laughter and sighs
- Skip over the "ums" and pauses as transcribed (which is what I decided to do)
- Transcribe only the relevant parts of the message.

Commercially available speech-to-text software, such as Dragon generally works best if you "train" the software to a specific voice and even then users should listen to the audio they wish to transcribe and re-speak what they hear for the software to translate. Moreover, there's a further step needed in proofreading the transcription and correcting any errors, which are quite many regardless of your mic quality of ability to speak like a news anchor with absolutely no accent.

Progress is being made on cracking the "speech to text" nut. Some voicemail providers offer automatic speech-to-text transcriptions of incoming voicemail. Apple's Siri is another step towards instant voice to text but the accuracy is well beyond the acceptable.

In the end, unlike computers, humans can compensate, at least to a degree, for another person's mumbling or to poor audio quality and other problems that can affect the clarity of the speech being transcribed.

Some recepients of the transcripts we product require single spaces, while some require double.

To ensure you do it right, in MS Word go into Tools, Options, hit the Spelling & Grammar tab, then click on Settings and there under Require is "Spaces required between sentences:", your choices are 1, 2 or don't check.

We found an autotext program that is awesome. And we know you can do a lot of this in the AutoCorrect of Word, however this program goes beyond the capabilities of just substitution. The program is Phrase Express and you can get it at Autotext - Clipboard Utility - Snippets Organizer. It is free for personal use. We find this program so invaluable. One of the nice things is the ability to set up phrases on the fly. You type it, highlight it, hit ALT+CTRL+C and the new phrase box pops up. You just click on what keys or characters you want, whether you want it as rich formatted text or plain text and hit enter. Then every time you hit those keys or characters your phrase will automatically pop up.

Some companies who order transcription services want the en dash while others want the double dash. The easy way to take care of that is this in Microsoft Word: Format, AutoFormat, Options and then on the AutoFormat tab you tic the box "Hyphens (--) with (–)"

Now for it to work as you type, you also need to go to the AutoFormat As You Type tab also and tic the same box.

Boxes tic'd means en dash (–), boxes not tic'd means double dash (--). Also when you do en dashes this way, they don't change, as you're typing, from double dash to en dash until after you type the next word and then hit the space bar, then it changes.

The events that are needed to be recorded, be it a conference, meeting, focus group or series of interviews, it is essential to maximize the chances of making a clear recording that can be in due course be accurately transcribed thereby strengthening the transcription. Typing and interview transcription services are simple to use. A transcription service is a business that converts speech, whether recorded or live, into a written or electronic text document. These services are generally provided for business, medical, or legal purposes. Transcription is one of the faster growing legitimate jobs. The most common type of transcription is from a spoken language source into word text, such as computer file that may be suitable for printing as a document such as a report.

With the advanced technology of today, we can have almost anything transcribed and at a very rapid scale. Outsourcing these services is a process that has been satisfying clients from more than a decade. Interview transcription services are a flagship, that meet clients expectations in terms of time or deadline as well as cost savings. It is an extensive term that encompasses transcribing of various kinds of interview into text format in the shortest amount of time, including multi- participants, or one person discussion with many, or a group interview. These services today are used by most of the business organizations. For example legal, financial and law firms, medical professionals, health care industries, entertainment or media professionals, and so on and so forth.

A vital part of the interviewing process that is solicited world- wide is the interview transcription services. There are many professional firms that offer interview services. The various types of these services include discretion interview, police interview, research and corporate transcriptions, press briefings, television interviews, dictation for books, articles and university lectures and so on. There are well- reputed transcription companies that deal with interview recordings at affordable prices. To get error free, fast, accurate and good quality interview transcription services and solutions, it is necessary to outsource the requirements to reliable and affordable transcription companies offering prompt solutions for business needs at the lowest possible cost.

Transcribing an interview can sometimes be an expensive affair if the basics are not kept in mind. The first and foremost thing that one needs to keep in mind is to choose a location where silence is restrained, so as to avoid any strain on the transcribers when listening to the audio. Secondly, an interview transcription needs to have a clear recording to avoid any error, as it serves as a document in future. Finally, holding mock interviews and rehearsing to avoid tongue tied situations, and to get the point wanted without exceeding the limit and number of word.

For any big or small company, to enlarge its productivity, work flow and at the same time, saving valuable time, money and efforts, an interview transcription service is an ideal option. In the competitive world today, to take one's business to a new height of success and profitability, outsourcing such services is the magic word.

Conducting an interview, coming up with good questions and establishing a report, is a challenging process. Transcribing that interview can also be difficult, and requires precise listening skills, patience, and careful editing. An hour-long interview can easily take 4 to 6 hours to transcribe, depending on how fast you type. Make sure you allow enough time to transcribe interviews accurately, and maintain the tone and quality of the original audio.

If you are transcribing an interview that someone else conducted, it's important to familiarize yourself with the subject's style and the context of the interview. Listen to at least a good portion of the interview first, before any typing, to prepare yourself.

When typing up the interview, to add clarity, you can add some clues to the tone of the interview in brackets, (e.g. [laughs], [points at bandmate]). Add these in either the first draft, or in the second edit when re-listening to the tape.

Words are harsher in print, so editing of filler and adding context afterwards can help present your subject in the correct light. Read over the final copy and make sure that your interview subject doesn't end up sounding more extreme or less articulate than they are in real life.

From my experience transcribing documentary interviews, I've found that you want to also we the specifications of the person that's hired you. A lot of times they want things exactly as they were said, including all the "ums" and "ahs."

If you're lucky enough to be using a digital file to transcribe from, there's plenty of software you can use to slow the file down so that you can type it up in real time (depending on how fast you type), which makes it easier.