On a personal level, the reasons for communication are self-evident. We wish to relay a message or make a request. Dialogue is arguably the most meaningful exchange in personal communication. Dialogue is distinguished from conversation, debate or discussion by the fact that with ‘true dialogue’ there are two critical factors that do not exist in other forms of communication. These are the need to listen; listen in true dialogue is defined as hearing the other person’s position without waiting to interject, and without bias. The other is the intrinsic instinct for dialogue that is inherent in all of us and is an underlying basis of understanding that goes beyond conscious dialogue to something much deeper, which is a communal dialogue.

Crowd sourcing is the term du jour in many professional service industries today but that isn’t to say it’s a passing fad. The concept is as old as brokering the services of people and that has been going on for a very long time. The irony is that crowd sourcing as a solution began to lose favor when it looked like computers would be able to assume the tasks of multiple humans. The premise was that computers would become more efficient in terms of speed and accuracy than their human counterparts. Transcription services are one area where confidence was running high that computers would take over. That has proved untrue and human transcription has surged ahead of computers in favor by those who require high accuracy and decent return times, but transcription isn’t the only field experiencing a return to mass human resources.

There is a lot of buzz around crowd sourcing but most proponents of utilising crowds for everything from opinion to transcription are missing the point. Crowds are used to replace computers that are inefficient at coping with human inflection. The quality of the crowd is key. A crappy crowd is as efficient as a crappy computer program. Some humans are as inept at understanding subtleties in speech and many are incapable of translating speech in a way traditionally referred to as phonetic transcription. Bad crowds are no better than computers at comprehending inflection or the grammatical elements required for speech segmentation.

Crowd sourced transcription services are available at affordable rates and provide superior quality to automated transcription. Transcribe your audio files using our professional crowd sourced transcriptionists located around the globe, and take advantage of human understanding of accent and nuance. We provide accurate and quality crowd sourced transcription solutions for your business needs 24 hours a day using real people.

We are very excited to be in the early stages of developing crowd-sourced services. Here’s a quick overview of the investment trends in our world:

“This year, venture capital finally recognized the impact and potential of crowd-driven platforms. Dorothy Sanders of Sandfish Design estimates that over $280 million of venture capital was invested in 35 different crowdsourcing platforms in 2011, with an average investment of over $8 million … Crowdsourcing [is] clearly a disruptive business model that replaces inefficient processes, delivers real value to customers, and generates real dollars.”

A transcription machine is a device which records or processes speech for translating that speech as text. In the old days of transcription this was done on a rather chunky Dictaphone transcription machines. Typists would play back recordings through headsets and type the content as they listened, usually stopping and starting as required using foot petal controls.

Transcription goes all the way back to the Egyptian pharaohs. In fact, a scribe (sesh) in the Egyptian court was a prized position that garnered much privilege for the lucky people awarded the job. The historic scribe is in fact the modern day transcriptionist. Instead of taking ink to papyrus, today’s scribe takes audio file to keyboard to convey to text the words spoken – not by a pharaoh, but by a law enforcement officer, a medical professional or one of the other numerous occupations which employ the transcription tool today. It’s a professional tool that is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and at the same time, easier to use and access.