From time to time it pays to step back and look at the fundamentals of what you do and why.
For transcription service providers, the answers for what and why may be complex and that is especially true if the transcription services cross professional fields, and it’s compounded again if transcribers are crowd sourced. Nonetheless, the self-review process is an important one for those who provide transcription services.
The Core of Transcription
Obviously, transcription services cater for those who require conversion of voice data to text data – that is transcription service at its most elementary level. The reasons to engage a transcription service are many and most commonly are for archival purposes, sharing, storage and publication. As such, the numbers of professionals who use transcription services are many and varied but not limited to those looking for the above solutions alone. For individuals who must regularly address an audience the imperative of a transcription service is even greater and indeed, quite different.
In order to perfect his or her craft an orator must be able to refer back to text and analyze the content and the inflection, nuance and prose that garnered the greatest audience response. Therefore, analytics may be an integral part of a transcription service for these individuals. On the other extreme, for those who need to archive only, speech analysis would be overkill. Therefore, it is fair to say that the best transcription services are those that are tailored to client need. Each client’s needs being so profoundly different from another.
Enter the Crowd
Crowd sourced transcription is the ‘why’ for many transcription services. It is not just the cutting-edge way to provide a service, it is that too, but it is much more. For the egalitarian, it is employment without borders and for the altruist; it is more work for more people in more places. For transcription service companies driving for optimal efficiency it is the most economic and yet precise method of creating accurate transcription, fast.
These are the focus of every transcription service although not all have the same ethos or engage the same processes. In re-assessing these from time to time, transcription services retain a contemporary edge and ideology.
