Work, work, work… You might have heard this phrase from many people in this era. Our world is modernizing at a great speed, and so is the work that we are supposed to do increasing. The work load on a single person has now become almost three times the normal work load he can bear. This is just one side of the coin. Let us tell you both the sides simultaneously. On one hand, we can see people dying under the work load they have to bear. On the other hand, we have a majority of people dying because they don’t have work. Quite unfair, isn’t it?
This problem has crept into every sphere, be it your daily life or your job. This problem has also entered into media and technology also. Media companies often require some voice interviews to be converted into words. This is called ‘transcription’.
Transcription in its Infancy
To quote the definition, “Transcription is the conversion of a live or recorded audio file into written or electronic text document.” The work of transcription has been live since the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, the way transcription was done previously is not the same as the way it is done now. Actually, the difference is quite vast. Let us tell you more about it. Earlier (when there was not recording device in existence), transcription was done by some qualified people who used to transcribe live speeches. They were supposed to write as the speech was said. In order to be fast, they used shorthand. Shorthand is the use of symbols (instead of the original language script) so as to increase the speed of writing. After the speech was finished, shorthand writings were then converted into original language scripts. Don’t you think that this job of converting speech to text was quite difficult to do and a bit complicated too? Of course, it was. This process also had the risk that the audio could be incorrectly transcribed. Moreover, since the work had to be done by one person alone, there was a greater chance that the transcription could be more inaccurate.
Transcription in its Middle Age
Then came the age when people had audio cassettes and CDs on which they could record these speeches. This increased the efficiency of the whole process of converting the voice to text. The audio files could now be transcribed later. The transcriber (the person who does the transcription) could now play the audio as many times as he wanted to. There was no problem of using shorthand, thus reducing the whole work to almost half of the previous. However, there was still one problem that existed before too. The whole work was done by only one person. Again, efficiency was less still.
Modern Transcription Process
Fortunately, with the advancement of technology, the whole process of transcription has now changed totally. Also, the work load has been distributed to many people instead of just one. Nowadays, we can also crop a part of the audio, thus allowing the distribution of fragments of a single audio file to many people. After the whole transcription work is finished, the files are merged by a separate person (known as ‘Editor’), who also does the corrections, if needed at all. Thus, the efficiency of the work increases to about 98% (not 100% because of the errors which are overlooked or ignored). This also solves the problem of increased work load which is most common these days. The problem of unemployment is also resolved since fragments of a single audio file get distributed to many people. There are many companies that provide services to transcribe audio to text. Some of them are Voice to Text Transcription Services.