There are a host of reasons why human transcription is so very, very much better than automated. In fact, there is really only two reasons why people choose automated and that is cost and speed. Automated transcription is generally much cheaper that human work, but when the end result is not correct, is that not money wasted?
If your budget does not stretch to a professional transcription service such as Singapore Transcription, you are better listening to the recording yourself and noting down the salient points. That way you spend nothing and are sure the information is correct. The same applies if speed is your problem.
First off, machines struggle with background noise, and you can verify this at home. Try coughing into our own microphone and the computer writes ‘WHAT’ or another word that it guesses sounds similar to your cough.
Most automated transcriptions cannot distinguish between different speakers and even the most advanced ones can only do it when the speakers are very different. This is hardly realistic. A company based in one area will probably have workers who all have the same accent, and if they are all male or all female, a meeting can sound like a monologue to automated software.
When people speak together or over a background noise this can sound garbled, and the written document have words missing or totally incorrect, if you get a machine to do the job. A human, on the other hand, can transcribe each speaker correctly, or at least indicate a part that is incomprehensible as being such.
Names of people, places, businesses, products and so on are often not recognised by software, so will either be wrong of left out. Again a human can usually fill these in correctly by knowing the sector and checking the technical terms related to that industry.
Machines struggle with punctuation too, so exclamation marks, quotes and the like can be missing. These can be important to full understanding of the transcript. Software does not understand homophones, (words with the same pronunciation but different meanings and spelling), even the simple ‘to, two and too’ are often too difficult for them. These are all mistakes human transcriptionists do not make.
In short, automated transcription provides a written copy that may or may not be correct – you need to check it yourself. Even if it is good enough to give a rough idea of the report, it is still not accurate.
Singapore Transcription uses top professionals who can offer accurate, quality transcripts for just about every field.
Is there really a choice?