To become a good transcriber, you don’t require any degree or diploma. You don’t even have to be certified by any certification body, online or physical. There are no special skills that you have to acquire after years of studying, because the process of transcribing an audio file is pretty simple. You just listen to an audio file and type what you hear. The job of the proofreader then is to check and edit what you typed. Sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? Or does it? In this post we’ll look at the things you can do to improve your skills as a transcriber and become better at a job which you would be more than likely be pursuing as your career, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this article.

1. More exposure to English:  This is an obvious one. People who transition from working at call centers, BPOs etc. have a much easier time with transcription, simply because in their previous job they have spent hours, days, weeks talking and resolving issues of people from different parts of the world, mostly Americans, Canadians, Australians and Britishers (I mentioned these countries because they’re the ones usually employing offshore call centers). It also depends on the culture or where you grew up, like if you had a lot of exposure to English when growing up, for example, English/Hollywood movies, TV series, sitcoms, English music, English discussion forums, English schools etc. All of that helps in the overall understanding and fluency with the language, and is very helpful when dealing with tough accents or fast speakers or tackling a difficult topic.

2. Better feedback for beginners:  As a transcriber, you really don’t have much control in this area. This depends on the proofreaders or mentors at your workplace and how well they can support you and give constructive feedback. As far as formatting, grammar and punctuations go, feedback is extremely crucial, because if the transcriber doesn’t get good feedback, that could make or break their career as a successful transcriber.

3. Being handy with search engines:  Everybody knows how to Google something they need to know about or read about it extensively on Wikipedia, but there are lots of tips and tricks which can save crucial time and make the difference between an okay transcriber and a good one. Lots of times transcribers just take, what they think they heard, as granted, without searching, and this can lead to some really silly mistakes, which with a little more attention could have been avoided. Learning Google shortcuts and tips and tricks is a great way to improve your transcription skills.

4. Typing Speed:  This is another very obvious one. A job that requires 99% typing of course would require you to be fast. There are other transcription aids such as foot pedals etc., and coupled with that if you are adept at 10-finger typing at around or more than 60 WPM, you can make good money with very little effort.

5. Use common sense:  I have told this to a lot of transcribers in my time working as a proofreader, please use common sense. There’s no point in just typing like a robot without trying to make sense of what you’re typing. Transcription is not such an easy job where you just put the audio on and start typing. Before you begin or while you’re transcribing, you need to be aware of the subject topic, a little bit about the speaker if possible, what company, country, city they belong to, etc. All this hardly takes a few minutes, but can make a huge difference in the accuracy and quality of a transcript.

Hopefully these pointers help new transcribers just entering the business hoping to make a decent living for themselves. We’ll be adding more to this topic in the future. Until then, stay frosty.

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We have delved into this topic several times over the course of us writing helpful articles on this blog. We received a lot of questions through our FAQ channel regarding accessibility, ease of use etc. regarding audio transcription. Why is transcription important? Well, a lot of clients understand the importance of this question, and that’s why get their audio files transcribed.  Let’s get into the nitty-gritties of this step-by-step.

Reaching a wider audience has always been the goal of every company, whether big or small. You want your product known far and wide. This has been the case ever since business was invented. Owner of a business as small as a grocery store would ask its customers to spread the word to get more business. Why should it be different for online businesses? By offering your users the option of reading or downloading a transcript, you’re opening up a whole new dimension, a dimension where deaf and cognitively challenged people can read what you had to say.

Another new dimension is where people in remote places around the world don’t have to wait for your audio interview, podcast or radio show to stream or buffer. They can simply open up the transcript in HTML form or just download the document straight from the website and read it at their own convenience. Of course, if you want to add your own personal touch, you can format the transcripts differently, and that gets the job done.

Audio transcription has shown to be extremely useful in whichever category you can possibly think of, whether it be business, media (TV or radio), academics, church, medical, health and lifestyle etc. etc. Not only does it help reach a wider audience, but that amount of text can only make Google and other search engines happy and help boost the website rankings as well. It’s a win-win situation on all fronts! Of course you can always use a voice-to-text software, if you think it’s helpful, but we’ll see in our next post what challenges it may or may not present. Until then, hopefully this was helpful!

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So, finally we’re back in the New Year after finishing off a TON of work before, during and after the holidays.  All I can say is a big, relieved “Phew!”  I believe this past year ScriptoSphere has taken a big leap in terms of clients, transcriber and proofreader quality, and overall accuracy and quality, something which we have always been chasing no matter how good our clients say we are.  It hasn’t been easy streamlining everything and putting a working formula in place, but we’re glad we’ve entered the next dimension.

The last three months of the year were painful and lovely at the same time.  It seemed like we would have an almost unstoppable barrage of new and existing clients, ALL wanting their work done at the same time.  But as we have always done in the past, the audio transcription team at ScriptoSphere came through with flying colors, albeit a few hiccups here and there.

Academic transcription and podcast transcription took the center stage during the last part of 2011, so much so that almost 80% of the work was from academic clients, with our usual and regular podcast and radio show clients making up the rest of it.  The topics we tackled also were really varied, where it went from human suffering, trauma to simple math and physics discussions to a whole plethora of health and lifestyle radio shows.  People say audio transcription is a tedious process, but I’d say we’re blessed to be working and learning so much at the same time.  Which other job lets you do this?

All I can say is that we are very grateful and thankful to all our clients who considered and then ultimately chose us for their work.  Hopefully our work has been satisfactory for all of them.  So far we have heard only good things, and here’s hoping that in the New Year, it will continue to be so.  We wish you a very Happy New Year from everybody at the ScriptoSphere team!

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A lot can be achieved on the internet today.  People can get almost anything done online, even as far as kids outsourcing their homework.  There are lots of workplace markets online now where one can bid for their work to be done cheaply.  Being an online audio transcription company, we believe it is our duty to let you, our clients and friends, know about the pros and cons of transcription services online.  So, here it goes:

PROS:

• You can get a difficult, time consuming and tedious job like audio transcription done fairly cheap if you know what to search for.
• You can find offshore companies providing same accuracy and quality as onshore companies at a much lesser price and much less hassle.
• Websites with everything streamlined, so you just upload your file and forget about it, and get a fully formatted transcript in return.

CONS:

• Lots of companies online claiming to be onshore and having “only American transcribers”, but really scamming clients, and in reality outsourcing almost all of their transcription work offshore.
• Charging unbelievably high prices for clear quality, perfectly audible audio files, sometimes even as high as $3 per minute of audio, which in our opinion is hugely unfair.
• Messy websites with nothing streamlined, making uploading files and getting other important information really difficult for the clients, also asking clients to enter their personal data everywhere.
• Many companies have what they call “budget transcription”, and if the client chooses that option, in many cases they get unfinished, non-proofread transcripts with low accuracy and quality, because they’re paying lesser.

So, our advice to potential clients is, always spend a bit more time on your searches.  It doesn’t hurt to read actual client testimonials to gauge how good a transcription service is either.  Make an informed decision, so that you get your buck’s worth.

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Outsourcing.  That word is synonymous worldwide with good sense, practicality and simple yet effective cost cutting.  So, how does it apply in audio transcription?  When you’re going to conduct and record interviews or already have recorded audio that needs to be turned to text, and if it’s a big number, you can’t even begin to think about transcribing them yourself.  Without the proper equipment, transcribing even 30 minutes can take one to two days.  Transcription in itself is a full time job, and it’s something that absolutely needs to be sourced to someone else.

Now, while transcription is a difficult job, it doesn’t really require a special degree, and certainly doesn’t require you to pay mammoth amounts of money to get it done.  This is the dilemma that most of the companies based in the US and UK face.  In order for their business to make sense, and to pay all their bills, they have to keep the costs high.

With outsourcing transcription, you can get the same interview transcribed with the same accuracy and quality for much, much lesser.  We have seen some companies charging astronomical prices, even up to $2.5 or $3 per minute, which in our opinion is absurd.  Recent studies have shown that the educational system in developing countries like India are on par, if not better, than schools even in the USA.  And since English is an official language, and that after USA, India has the largest number of English speakers, this makes India the perfect candidate to outsource your English related work to.

ScriptoSphere only charges $0.90 per minute of clean and clear audio.  The audio quality goes down, price goes up, which is only fair.  We have been churning out accurate transcripts for almost half a decade now, and we don’t intend to stop.  Why are our prices low?  Because we understand that in these tough financial times, we don’t need to charge extra to make a quick buck.  We help ourselves by helping our clients, and this has always been our motto.  Contact us today for more info.

Visit our testimonials page to see what our satisfied clients have to say about us.

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This is for people that shop using their brains.  We all do it.  Whenever we’re shopping or searching for something online, we always try to look for a product that is both affordable and does what it’s supposed to do.  You wouldn’t want anything less.  Clients have told us that when they were searching the internet for affordable transcription service providers, none were as forthcoming or as honest or as helpful as us.  Now, we’re not giving ourselves a review here, just merely forwarding client thoughts to you, who could be our potential client.  They all do it, when they put client testimonials on their websites.

The affordable audio transcription rates that we provide on our website are not because we do a less than stellar job, but because we understand what the value of every penny saved means in this financial climate means.  The quality of our work is evidenced on our testimonials page.  We charge only $0.90 per audio minute for a good quality audio file; audio quality goes down, price goes up, which in our opinion is only fair.  This amounts to $54 for a one hour audio file, which is WAY lesser than what our competitors charge for pretty much the same product, some going up to $100 or even $120.

So, how do we do the same job at half the price?  We at ScriptoSphere offer our professional transcription services through experience gained over a decade of working in this field delivering only the top notch, best quality, error-free transcripts.  So, this comes as only second nature to us.  We have a modest setup, and so don’t feel the need to charge the clients extra for anything.  We can be your go-to company for professional transcription services with our quick turnaround time, availability and reliability in delivering the most accurate and attractive, easy to read transcripts.

On top of this, you don’t have to worry about your audio file format. We tackle almost all of them: It can be any of the following:

• MP3, WAV, WMA, ASF, DSS, MOV, AVI, MP4, AIFF (or anything else you may throw at us!)

You also don’t have to worry about any type of audio, since we have accumulated experience over the last decade in transcribing anything and everything like:

• Podcasts, Financial, Scientific and general
• Focus group interviews, Academic interviews
• Radio shows
• TV News shows, interview shows
• Articles, lectures, forums, reports
• Business meetings, conferences, teleconferences
• Discussions, debates, webcasts, interactive forums
• Seminars, symposiums
• Sermons, prayer meetings
• Scientific research interviews
• Depositions, Insurance interviews
• Subpoenas and general correspondence

So, you can rest assured that whatever the audio content you might have, we’ll take care of it, and at a price and turnaround time that is difficult to get anywhere else.  Contact us today to get a free quote.

Affordable audio transcription prices

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Let’s say you have a website, and let’s say you record audio or video interviews and put them on your website for viewers to listen or to watch them.  Now, it’s all kosher for your loyal viewers and fans, but what if you want more people to notice your content, how does it affect you getting new fans?  Something as simple as getting those interviews transcribed and putting them next to the audio interview can boost your website’s online ranking, ten fold, on almost all major search engines.

A simple way to understand this is to imagine yourself as a search engine crawler, a search engine software, which is a special algorithm written by developers, that can only see and read, but not hear.  Now, you have uploaded your very detailed interview with a very important personality, onto your website, and you want to reach a wide audience who may be searching for that very thing on a number of search engines.  The deaf search engine crawler, when it “crawls” your website, isn’t going to wait around and listen to your whole interview, even if it’s as short as 2 minutes long, because that’s just not a part of its algorithm, and frankly there will never be an algorithm as advanced as to listen to an audio or video recording, and farm important keywords from it and rate your website accordingly.  We’re talking way into the future, Matrix type artificial intelligence.  We don’t even have robots with that kind of intelligence, I don’t expect search engines to be getting that fancy soon.

So, the current search engine algorithms, like I said, can only read and not hear.  THIS is the exact reason why getting your audio and video interviews, podcasts, radio shows transcribed helps your website rating tremendously.  Putting subtitles in video can help the viewer, and also help in getting more users from different geographical locations, but it doesn’t do much for search engines.  When the search engine crawler comes to  your website and reads the transcripts of your interviews, podcasts, seminars etc., it then categorizes them and lists them according to your interview topic, subject etc.  So, if your interview was about a certain musician, sportsperson, media celebrity, every time someone searches on Google for that person, major search engines will suggest your website to the user, based on the amount and relevance of the content on your website.

What most of the major search engines also do is farm websites to see how much content they have, and since even a normal 10-15 minute interview can make for a quite long transcript, your website will have ready-made SEO content laced with tons of keywords and sentences talking specifically about your line of business.  And how much do you pay for all of this?  Only $0.90 per minute to ScriptoSphere if your audio is good quality, which most of the one-on-one interviews already are.  Do contact ScriptoSphere for all your podcast transcription, interview transcription, media transcription or SEO needs.

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Over the last very hectic year or so, we have had a growing number of clients needing our academic transcription services.  These were mostly graduate students, PhD candidates, researchers, associate deans etc. conducting interviews for their thesis or other projects.  So, this serves as the perfect premise for us to let you know about ScriptoSphere.com‘s attractive academic transcription services.

Judging by a lot of our client testimonials, it seems that we’re regarded as a pretty good, reliable, accurate and affordable transcription company.  We have served, over the years, a growing number of clients from different universities in USA, UK and other parts of Europe, providing them accurate and affordable transcripts, which fits perfectly into a PhD candidate or a student’s budget.  We charge only $0.90 per audio minute for transcribing and proofreading all academic interviews, for a turnaround time of 2 to 3 business days.

Academic transcription services around the internet have proven to be a boon for PhD candidates, research associates, professors, dean or students in any discipline.  Usually doctoral candidates have to conduct research for their thesis to present to the board that will process their PhD application.  This requires them to conduct lots of interviews, sometimes even between 10-20 hours.  Since it can take forever to filter out finer points from an audio interview, they then need to transcribe it.  And anyone who has ever tried to transcribe even 10 minutes of audio, knows what a tedious task it can be.  This is where we come in with our easy to read website and affordable rates.

We pride ourselves on our extensive experience in the field of academic transcription over the past decade, and we can manage with the affordable rates we provide, because it comes as second nature to us.  The whole process is also very easy and streamlined for our clients.  If you have a recorder, all you have to do is transfer your audio files to a computer or a portable device, then open up ScriptoSphere.com, go to the upload page, browse and select your audio files, and just click send.  We’ll receive the audio files within minutes, contact you via email with a quote and begin the transcription, and you get the transcript back in your email inbox as soon as humanly possible.  Really, it’s that easy!

Do not hesitate to contact us in case you have any questions.  We are here to serve.

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More often than not, we get audio files which a sound editing software can do nothing about.  Sometimes the speaker’s voice is engulfed by so much background or static noise or is so faint, that a normal sound processor can’t do the job anymore.  This is where a specialized sound unit can help, maybe not too much, but there definitely is a difference.

These days when buying a new PC, most good motherboards come with already a pretty good sound processor onboard, and that will get the job done in most instances, but it never hurts to spend a little extra on hardware and peripherals so that you can do your job much better in the end.  There are many sound cards available in the market, from entry level stuff to really high end audiophile quality gear.  The onboard sound on motherboards are as good as entry level sound cards, and for transcription we don’t really need to go to higher end sound cards.

So, let’s look at some of the good, mid-level sound cards, that in our opinion would help tremendously when dealing with bad quality audio files.

1.  ASUS Xonar DX 7.1

This is primarily a gaming card, and can help in delivering crystal clear quality sound, amplified even better if you have good quality headphones.  Hugely helpful in audio transcription.  In our experience this card has so far proven to be very effective and worth the investment.  Very good for its price, high fidelity, no distortion even on very high volumes, and a proper 7.1 channel sound card. Even the audiophiles would love it.  This goes for around $90.

2.  Creative Soundblaster X-fi Xtremegamer 7.1

We used this one for a little while and were impressed by the sound quality even on higher volumes.  Good fidelity, good value for money.  The gamers would get much more use out of it, as reviewers have noticed visibly reduced lag with awesome sound quality when playing PC video games.  It was very helpful for transcribers and proofreaders who used it.  The quality was slightly lesser than the Xonar DX referenced above, but it was good enough.  The retail price is around $100

3.  Auzentech AZT-XPCINE X-Plosion Cinema 7.1

If you can afford to spend some extra money on a sound card, our advice would be to go with this one.  This would be more than enough for transcription purposes, but performs amazingly on all fronts.  Whether you’re a music or a movie fan, you can blast your volume up to any level, and this won’t lose any quality.  Amazing fidelity at extremely high volumes, good compatibility with newer versions of Windows, and neat driver support as well.  This can retail at around $120 to $140.

We’ll try to get more information on this topic in our future posts.

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One of our crew, Florina, tells us about her experience. “I remember about maybe two years ago I had to fill some form for the local authority and the clerk asked me what is my job.  Obviously I answered “I’m a transcriber“, and the clerk was confused.  So, I then had to briefly describe my job to him.  The final of this short story was funny, as the clerk still wasn’t able to figure out what I really do, so he told me, “Write there, PC operator.”

So, I thought it wouldn’t be completely useless to try and develop what is that we actually do in this field and what’s really this domain of work about, is the occupation of turninv voice to text needed in the 3rd millennium?

First of all, let’s describe what an audio transcriber does to earn his living: and to start at the most simplified level, we’re going to tell you that every audio recording that needs to be turned into a document, requires a human transcriber to do it.  Of course, there’s plenty of voice recognition software in the market to do this job, but at the present time these are as good as useless in cases of fast speech, foreign accent, multiple speakers, background noise, and of course if the file contains specialty terms, technical or more rare ones.

Besides, you need to train these robotic transcribers (voice recognition software) for hours and hours for them to understand different accents and difficult words.  You have to sit with a microphone and read passages to it like a parrot for it to actually do a half decent job.  Still it’s not good enough, because they’re good at getting what you say slowly speaking into the microphone, but when it comes to audio transcription, they’re horrible.  And until they perfect that system, which won’t be for a long time coming, you’ll have to do with us pesky transcription service companies.

Now, since we have clarified that, think for a second and try to find a use for this audio to text conversion operation.  The first thing that comes to my mind are meetings.  Can you visualize all those suited executives, board of directors, CEOs, businessmen that love to have meetings all the time?  Well there’s one piece of the puzzle, because when they perhaps need publish their conference call and make it available to the public, and to recheck what one or the other said at the meeting, they won’t go fast forwarding or rewinding throughout that audio file.  It’s much simpler to press Ctrl+F and find your keyword, isn’t it?

The main purposes of audio transcription include having a proper archive, publishing interviews in the physical printed form or web media, sometimes for SEO, for the sole purpose of having better ranking on a search engine, from helping the people with disabilities to read what they can’t hear, or helping a person remember what they said, transcribing radio shows or podcasts to make them more accessible to a wider range of audience, to adding subtitles to videos and even whole movies.

Picture a physician, a dentist, a psychiatrist who sees plenty of people every day, how would they remember each patient’s problem, their symptoms, their diagnosis, their medication? In a small town it’s easy, as physical files in a steel cabinet would do, but what about large cities with millions of people?  That’s where a transcription service comes in. The doctor simply speaks into a digital recorder, his assistant uploads the file on the transcription company‘s website, and the rest is taken care by the transcribers.

The list can go on and on and on, but the bottom line is that audio transcription is now applied in more sectors than you can think, and it’s growing every day by leaps and bounds.  The myth that audio transcription is an easy task, can be debunked in 5 minutes by you trying to transcribe even a 10 minute audio file with 99% accuracy, and just see how long it takes.  Feel free to contact us in case you have any doubts or questions.

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