Transcription is the representation of spoken language in written form. You are converting audio to text, either manually or automatically. The process is often used by students at universities. Students need to convert their interviews into written text for research purposes. Transcription is also used in podcasting and video production. It helps to make content accessible to a wider audience, for example: people who are deaf or hard of hearing. A rather new implementation is to use transcription in business and administration. In this article we explain why transcribing meetings and interviews can be useful for businesses.

Interview meeting and job interviews

One implementation of transcribing for businesses is to record meetings and job interviews. These recordings are converted into a written report for future reference. This way it is easy for administration to follow-up on meetings and interviews. The transcription can be done manually or with an automatic transcription app.

A transcription can be “verbatim” or “literal”. If the report is verbatim, it is transcribed in complete sentences regardless of what was actually said. In the case of a literal report, everything is written down exactly as it was said, possibly with sighs and exclamations.

To create a useful and correct report, recording guidelines are a must. For example, it is important that the participants introduce themselves at the start of each meeting or interview. This makes transcribing a lot more streamlined. Also providing a list of participants in advance makes it easier for the transcriber.

With administrative work, it is also important to establish some rules in advance. For both dictation and transcription, it must be clear whether the transcriber must type out exactly what is said or whether he or she can make up his or her own sentences. Word-by-word or text-by-word transcription. It is important to establish rules for this, otherwise you will end up with different styles of reports.

Recording equipment is also very important. A transcribe app or recorder app on a smartphone can record well when a good microphone is connected. A dedicated interview recorder with the appropriate transcribing program is the best setup.

A well-known transcription application is Amberscript. Unfortunately, Amberscript has no live transcribe. You always do the transcription after the interview. Amberscript does allow you to make corrections of the mistakes it made. The software learns from your corrections and will provide better results the next time u use it. Amberscript works completely online in the browser, so it is compatible with most devices.

How long does transcribing take?

The time it takes to transcribe an audio file depends on a few things. The transcription software used, speech recognition, author’s speaking speed, secretary’s typing speed and the quality of the recording. When using a good speech recognition algorithm, the time advantage is 52 %. A recording of 1 hour takes 2 hours to type (manual transcription) and 1.5 hours with speech recognition (automated transcription).