Transcription Service Blog by Transcription Institute

This is a device that converts audio tape cassettes into MP3 files and stores them directly onto an iPhone or iPod touch. It accepts most iPhones and iPod touches, and normal or chrome cassette tapes. With its free app, conversion to MP3 is as simple as inserting a cassette, docking an iPhone or iPod touch, and pressing play. Tapes can be listened to using the headphones jack (headphones required) or by connecting its audio output to a stereo system for scanning forward or reverse to select tracks for conversion. Cassettes can also be converted to a PC running Windows 7, XP, or Vista or a Mac using the included software. Its small footprint 8 oz. weight allows easy portability for conversion anywhere at anytime. Requires two AA batteries.

Do you like this converter? We will gladly send you one with your single transcription services order of $500 or more.

Just mention code DEAL500 when ordering on our website http://transcriptioninstitute.com/. The device comes with uncodintional lifetime guarantee. This offer is only available to new Transcription Institute customers. You will not be eligible for the Offer if you or your organization create(s) more than one account to receive additional benefits under the Offer.

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.

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.

Whether you're a large transcription services company or small business with one or several  or no employees, you may be required by State or Federal laws, or your vendors/subcontractors, to carry insurance.

In this article we're going to review what type of insurance you may need, how much it could cost, and where you can get coverage.

General Overview

There are many insurance companies in the U.S. And you don't have to shop all of them for insurance to get the best deal, however, we recommend you contact several brokers for quotes and than compare coverage and pricing. Personally for business insurance and workers compensation we use and recommend Paperless Insurance Services. They are brokers, who have access to multiple insurance companies and provide comprehensive and competitive insurance coverage we can afford.

For transcription service business there are 3 types of most common insurance:

1. General Liability or Business Owners Policy: covers bodily injury or property damage losses. General liability insurance will pay for legal representation in the court, litigation, and damages. Business Owners Policy also includes coverage for your business personal property against thefts, fire, and other common causes that can destroy it. Usually, the premium is low and starts from $250 for General Liability only and $500 for Business Owners Policy.

 Case example: Say you have an office and your clients stop by to drop off some tapes or discs for transcription and flips over a step. You call for emergency and possibly, later, being sued for bodily injury.  General Liability should help.

 Case example: your expensive equipment for transcription is stolen or destroyed by fire. Insurance company will pay for new equipment and for lost income, while equipment was in the process of ordering, shipping, installing etc... 

Common Limits: $1,000,000 per occurrence

2. Workers Compensation: if you have employees you're required to carry Workers Compensation insurance. This coverage will provide payments for medical bills and lost wages, and rehabilitation for employees injured when performing their job duties. In some States you must provide the Workers Comp. coverage for subcontractors as well. Please consult with your local authorities. The cost of Workers Compensation should not be high, and is regulated in each State. In California, for example, the rate is 0.6 per $100 of payroll. Another words, you're paying $6 for each $1000 of payroll. There are certain minimum premium requirements with each carrier in each State, but generally speaking, Workers Comp. starts from $525/yr.

Limits: Each U.S. State has own workers compensation insurance law and limits required on the policy.

 Case example: Say, similar accident happens with your employee, who is trapping over a broken step.  Workers Compensation should help.

3. Professional Liability, also known as Errors and Omissions:  this is the coverage that provides payments for unintentional errors or omissions in your work.

 Case example: You work with a School District and transcribe lectures for school teachers, so later the school district can publish new textbooks. A mistake has been made in transcription and is discovered after 50,000 textbooks are printed. Now the School District has to print those again... And guess who is paying for that? Right, your professional liability insurance.

 Case example: You work with a lawyer and transcribe testimonies and make mistakes... Oh, you don't want mess with that...

Limits: $1,000,000 per occurrence.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:

This is not an offer for insurance. Please contact your licensed broker to obtain actual quotes.

Case examples are fictitious. Insurance claims are reviewed on a case by case basis and availability coverage is not guaranteed.

We're not legal advisers. Please consult with your legal adviser to learn how a lack of insurance coverage may affect your business operations, and what are the appropriate coverage limits and options for you operations. 

With the new innovations more people are working from home, or working from the road.  All of this work is done through the internet and through the phone.  And a lot of times people don’t know how to run a phone conference.  Trust me; I’ve set in on a lot of those meetings.  So, I decided to write some steps that will help with organizing a phone conference in a more structured way.

Send out the agenda before the meeting

The key to an effective meeting is an agenda - this applies to any kind of meeting, not just a conference call. Make sure you send out the details of the call in number in advance, and make sure it stands out, so the participants will not miss it.  If you using Outlook send out meeting using the tools that are built in, it will help you track and be aware of who is attending your meeting, and it will do all the work for the participants for them by filling in their calendar slot with your meeting.

If the conference call is a regular status update, ensure you also send out the meeting notes from the previous call.  In that case the first item on the agenda should be checking in with people up for the actions they've agreed to be responsible for in the previous meeting.

Introductions and details

At the beginning of the call introduce any newcomers to the rest of the group and invite them to spend a couple of minutes describing themselves and their role on the call.

Next, ensure everyone has a copy of the agenda. I suggest recording the conversation, so later one you can hire a transcription services company to transcribe the entire conversation. This serves two benefits: firstly, everyone will be more careful and accountable for what they say, and secondly, a single set of meeting notes will be distributed after the transcription of the meeting is complete.

Finally, lay out the rules for interaction on the call. Because it's audio-only, the usual cues we use to indicate that we wish to take a turn at speaking are not present.  Since you recording the call ask people to say they name before they speak so it is easier for the transcriptionist, and your notes are clearer. Clearly it's unrealistic to expect people to stick to the interaction rules for the duration of the call, but laying them out at the outset will help ensure things run quickly and smoothly.

Keep it short

Studies have shown that people start to suffer a number of unpleasant side-effects after holding a telephone receiver to their ear for longer than about an hour. In any event, forty minutes is about the limit of most people's concentration span.

If you find the call is starting to drag on beyond an hour, it's a good idea to wrap things up and continue at another time. If you find this is a regular occurrence, it may be an indicator that you need to revisit the agenda, or possibly split the group up into separate, more focused groups. A particular time-waster is having engineers and businesspeople on the same conference call. A better way to handle this is to have three shorter meetings - one with just the engineers, one with the businesspeople, and one with single representatives from each group to present the results and take any feedback to the next department meeting. Remember practice makes perfect, so get on the phone and schedule some meetings.

VoiceWalker is a transcriber's tool, designed to help you transcribe audio or video recordings. VoiceWalker lets you play back the sound in a controlled way, with the benefit of being able to systematically step (or "walk") through a recording, repeating short segments for a specified number of repetitions, then moving on to the next segment. The segments overlap, so that the transcriber does not become disoriented.

VoiceWalker assumes that you have digitized your recordings as computer files to work with them more easily (for information on how to digitize, see the VoiceWalker manual).

VoiceWalker is free, available for Windows only. There are two versions:

Version 2.0 supports WAV files for all functions, and also plays Windows AVI files and Quicktime MOV files. (This version was written in Visual Basic.)
DOWNLOAD VoiceWalker 2.0 (3.0 MB)

Version 1.0 is very similar in functionality to version 2.0, but supports only audio (WAV files). It has a few different features from those implemented in 2.0, so you may wish to try both to see which works better for you. (This version was written in SumTotal's ToolBook.)
DOWNLOAD VoiceWalker 1.0 (4.0 MB)

VoiceWalker manual. The easiest way to learn to use VoiceWalker is to just try it out. Click on all the buttons and see what they do - since VoiceWalker never modifies your files, but only plays them back, you can do no harm. To learn more about VoiceWalker, you will find that all the features are fully documented in the VoiceWalker manual.
DOWNLOAD VoiceWalker Manual in pdf (0.2 MB)