Popular platforms for transcribing conversation

Transcription of a conversation is its conversion from an audio or video format to a text one. In the modern business world, the level of communication and information exchange plays an important role. The transformation of speech into a text format is necessary to improve the accessibility of information. And the efficiency of companies depends on the quality, accuracy and speed of conversion.

Transcription technology is not new, previously shorthand was used for verbatim recording of oral speeches. Now this can be done by using technical means of sound recording. But to translate audio into text, you still have to decrypt it.

With the development of AI, the transformation process has become much simpler. Artificial intelligence-based programs have learned to perceive the speech of several people, record it in accordance with the rules of spelling, translate into other languages, and format text. This article is about where this technology is used, how to choose a platform and how to refine the resulting text. Unfortunately, even the best services make mistakes when recognizing words and phrases. And this has to be dealt with manually for now.

Types of transcription

Automatic

It is performed using free online services with built-in recognition algorithms and translation into text format. However, the quality of the finished product strongly depends on the audio quality. Any noise, indistinct diction, or speaker’s accent lead to incorrect recognition.

Semi-automatic

This is a combination of technical means and manual processing of the material. The algorithm performs the primary transcription, and then the person corrects the errors manually. Editing a half-finished draft is easier and faster, but it still takes too much time. Therefore, if you need to quickly get a printed document with high accuracy, this method will not work.

Professional

In order for the document to be accurate, clear, verified and laid on the table quickly, it is necessary to involve professional decryption specialists. They have high-speed printing skills, absolute literacy, good hearing, and attentiveness. Decryptioners do not use transcribing algorithms, but listen to an audio recording through headphones and type it manually, immediately observing spelling rules and precise wording. This approach ensures maximum speed and accuracy of recognition.

Areas of application

Transcription of conversations is an important tool for improving the efficiency of work in various fields. It allows you to save accurate data, which is then easier to store, analyze, and increases the availability of information, for example, for those who cannot hear well or for some reason could not attend an important meeting.

Business

Transcription is widely used in this field:

1. Improving the quality of service. Decrypted negotiations with clients allow you to analyze the course of the meeting, identify problems, and make decisions on optimizing sales strategies. And feedback analysis will allow you to respond more quickly to customer requests and improve the quality of service.
2. Honing the professional skills of the staff. Transcribed recordings of the most successful negotiations can be used as training materials.
3. Optimization of business processes, improvement of work efficiency. Documenting meetings allows you not to miss the details of the decisions made, as well as to fix deadlines and responsible persons. This helps to increase discipline and improve communication between different departments of companies.
4. Improving communication and transparency of decision-making. The free access of employees to the database of decrypted documents increases the transparency of the environment. Everyone understands the reasons for the decisions made and can clarify any aspect of making these decisions.
5. Compliance with documentation standards, as well as the legal side of the work. Many types of activities require strict documentation, for example, when negotiating, concluding transactions, and during legal consultations. Transcribing audio recordings makes it easier to meet such requirements.

Medicine

Audio recordings of patient appointments, consultations, and examination results speed up the work of medical staff. And then the doctor or nurse, having decoded the audio, can fill out the patient’s card, clarify the details of complaints or examination results. Recorded text is easier to store and easier to analyze.

Journalism and Media

Today, all interviews, conferences, briefings are recorded on a dictaphone, and later they are decrypted and articles and news are already being written on their basis. The presence of an audio recording allows you not to miss the details, accurately reproduce the interviewer’s thought, and analyze the information.

Education

The needs of a student are similar to the needs of a journalist: he also needs to process large amounts of information heard in lectures every day. Not every teacher provides students with summaries of their speeches. Previously, students had to take notes manually. But with the advent of sound recording technology, the process has become much easier. Now you can record each lecture verbatim, and then translate the audio into a synopsis at home, without missing any meaning or details.

Right

In the field of jurisprudence, transcription is especially important during court sessions, where, according to the law, all the nuances of what is happening must be recorded, down to comments about the emotions of the speakers. Transcription of records is also necessary when conducting interrogations, confrontations, and analyzing evidence.

What to pay attention to when choosing a speech analytics service

The quality of the decrypted document largely depends on the quality of the original record, but the capabilities of the analytical service are also important:

1. The accuracy of speech recognition. A good service should hear and recognize speech even in conditions of increased noise, distinguish between different people’s conversations, and understand if a person speaks with an accent or slight speech defects. If you need to decrypt a foreign language, make sure that the program supports the desired language.
2. Safety. Privacy is another fundamental criterion for choosing a platform. There are regulatory requirements that ensure this parameter, for example, compliance with GDPR or HIPAA. It is important to make sure that your data is encrypted in the most reliable ways.
3. Speed. In business, this aspect is also important: entrepreneurs strive to minimize the time between oral agreements and signing paper agreements. The best option in this case is real–time transcription.
4. Support for different recording formats (MP3, MP4, WAV), as well as the ability to integrate with other services that you work with, for example, CRM.
5. Additional options. Some programs are trained in editing, formatting, text search, analytics, and advice formulation.
6. User reviews. You shouldn’t rely on them completely, but it doesn’t hurt to get acquainted and find out what problems they are facing.
7. Cost. Advanced AI-based programs are not free: somewhere you need to buy a package, somewhere you pay by the minute, somewhere you subscribe. The main thing here is to know exactly what is included in the payment, so that after the conclusion of the contract it does not turn out that you have to pay extra for some of the options.

FollowUp Review

Using the AI secretary from FollowUp guarantees:

• The transcription accuracy is at least 98%;
• 100% preservation of all important details of negotiations;
• providing analytics for each meeting;
• timely distribution of Sammari to all interested parties;
• complete confidentiality.

In addition, the AI bot:

• He will give useful recommendations to the line employee on improving communication in the department (team);
• the sales manager will be given a detailed assessment of each meeting with the client with recommendations for improvement;
• The HR manager will offer advice on how to improve the approach to interviews;
• The recruiter will highlight the candidate’s weaknesses and give recommendations for a deeper check.

Our company’s engineers can refine the platform to meet the needs of your business, as well as help with its integration.

The introduction of an AI secretary will allow:

1. To the staff: spend less time doing the routine, do not lose tasks, do not miss deadlines, to clarify the details of the tasks set, returning to previous meetings at any time, increase loyalty when communicating with customers and clients.
2. Managers: get a comprehensive analytical picture of all meetings, monitor the quality of communications, optimize business processes, increase the level of internal communication.

Tips for working with text

After automatic decryption, the text must be verified:

1. Check the quality. For various reasons, some words and phrases may be incorrectly recognized by the machine, which will disrupt the meaning of the sentence.
2. Remove the excess. Some words can be written twice, and extra letters, phrases, and signs may also appear. All of this should be deleted automatically (if the platform supports such a feature) or manually.
3. Format, add punctuation. Highlighting paragraphs and punctuation marks will make it easier to read and understand what is written.
4. Break it down into paragraphs. Solid text is poorly perceived. Structure it: break it down into paragraphs and title each one.
5. Check for compliance with the source code. At the end, you need to listen to the audio again, checking with the text version, and make sure that there are no semantic errors, as well as an accurate presentation of facts, details, and basic thoughts.

Conclusion

The importance of information, data, and the speed of their transmission is constantly growing. Transcription of conversations has become an important tool for business, education, law and the media. It makes it easier to get valuable information, improve the quality of service, reduce time for routine tasks, and optimize business processes. There are more and more platforms for speech recognition every year, and the introduction of AI makes them more advanced, sensitive, literate, but also expensive. When choosing an intelligent assistant for your company, consider its most important capabilities:

• speech recognition accuracy;
• safety;
• speed;
• support for languages and formats;
• the ability to integrate with other services.