Scribie.com

The one option we always wanted to support was the 12 hour delivery. Last week we were finally able to launch this feature. It’s sort of a big deal since it’s the first time such a option is being offered in the General Audio Transcription industry. You can now download the transcript within 12 hours of placing the order, with a quality guarantee of 98%. This means that you can order the files in the evening and download a highly accurate transcript by the time you start work the next morning. This was one of the most requested feature from our customers.

However it’s a difficult feature to support (which is one of the reasons why nobody else does it) and presents several hurdles. First of all, it has to be available 24×7 to be useful. This is mostly an operational issue and not that hard to overcome since it required setting up a night shift team to start off where the day shift team left off. We laid out plans for it in the first quarter of this year, started hiring and training. We were able to get the night shift operational this month.

The other big issue was quality. We cannot sacrifice quality for speed; a rework is not an option if you’re on a tight deadline. This was quite hard since it required lot of tuning of our transcription system. We follow a rigorous four step process. The first two steps, Transcription and Review, are done by our certified freelancers. The last two steps, Proofreading and QC are done in-house. For the 12 hour delivery to work, the file should be reviewed and ready for our in-house team as early as possible. Right now, we can get to that stage in around 3 hours, given an hour long file. The industry standard for 1 hour of audio is 4 hours for transcription and 2-3 hours for review.

Finally everything fell into place and we are very proud present the 12 hour TAT option. We are the first among the new crop of online audio transcription services to offer this. It shows off the maturity of our transcription system and gives us some bragging rights. So keep us in mind when you are under that tight schedule and need a transcript done in like yesterday.

We are excited to launch our latest feature: Express Delivery. Express Delivery orders will deliver the transcript within 12 hours of the order being placed. Therefore if you place the order by 8 PM in the evening, you’ll have the transcript before you start you work next day. As usual the transcript is guaranteed to be 98 or more accurate.

The charge for Express Delivery is $3.00 per minute of audio which equates to $180 for a 1 hour file. There is also a cap on how many hours of audio can be Express Delivered per day: 2 hours. If you try to place orders of more than 2 hours, you’ll be an error for the same.

Click on the options button and tick the checkbox labelled Express Delivery to enable it.

General Transcription is a relatively new field compared to Medical or Business transcription. Because the field is young, and growing, it presents a promising career choice for people with the right skill sets. In this post we are going to talk about what this job entails and the opportunities in this field.

Skills

The basic skills required for general transcription is good typing speed (minimum of 40 words per minute) and excellent comprehension of spoken English. Most of the time you will encounter North American, British and Australian accents of English. However exposure to non-native accents is a plus. The ability to apply contextual judgment is also important in transcription to differentiate similar sounding words. Internet research for names of places and people is another skill required in this job. You have to be able to construct search terms which return the most relevant results.

Job Profiles

There are two broad categories of work: typing and review. Typing, as the name suggests, involves listening to the audio and typing it out.  It’s the most effort intensive step of the transcription process. It generally takes around 4 hours to type 1 hour of audio. The most important skills required here are typing speed and comprehension.

Review is the step after transcription where the audio is matched against the transcript and all mistakes are corrected. Review is much less time-consuming than typing and it takes around 2 hours to complete a review of 1 hour of audio. However, it greatly depends on the quality of the transcript. The important skill in reviews is ability to spot mistakes and apply context.

At Scribie, we have also hire Proofreaders and Quality Analysts. Both of these are specialized types of review and requires higher degrees of skill and experience.

Career Growth

The typical career in general audio transcription starts as a typist level and goes on to QA, on the technical side. To reach the QA level it takes around 5 years or so, but depends mostly on the ability and merit of the individual. On the managerial side the opportunities vary depending on the structure of the organization,  but management positions would involve managing a team of few transcribers and reviewers.

Conclusion

General audio transcription can be rewarding career for those who pay attention to detail and excel at doing repetitive tasks. It is also a good choice for people who absorb knowledge of any kind and like learning new things. If you would like to try it out then come visit us at our office (if you’re based in Bangalore, India) or apply online.

We are excited to introduce the 30 day flexible delivery option. With this option the file will be delivered anytime within the next 30 days, with delivery guaranteed on the 30th day, for a discount of 40%. The effective rate with this option therefore is $0.90 per minute of the audio. That works out to $54 for an hour of audio.

This option will save you even more on your transcription costs if a 1 month turnaround is acceptable. As usual, it comes with our accuracy guarantee of 98%, with free re-reviews if the quality not up to the standard.

One of the most frequent questions we get is what type of audio files can we transcribe. Audio transcription is a vast field with many different specializations and categories. This post discusses some of types of transcription and our support for them.

Medical Transcription

Medical Transcription also known as MT, is a process where the reports or diagnosis dictated by Doctors/Physicians are converted into text by trained professionals. There is usually a single speaker. Most of the companies use ASR for the initial step i.e transcribing and then the trained professionals proofread them thus ensuring the desired quality. The output of MT usually is used in EMR (Electronic Medical Records), Medical Coding or as prescriptions. Companies who specialize in MT are expected to be HIPAA certified which puts to rest the concerns about patients privacy. Accuracy is also a very important factor in Medical Transcription.

We do not cover Medical Transcription at Scribie.com and we are not HIPAA compliant.

Business Transcription

Business transcription consists of transcribing conference calls which might be used to generate an executive summary or MoM or might just be recorded for future references. It usually has multiple speakers and the topic can be varied. The desired accuracy is around 98%. Earnings call also come under this category, which are mostly used by shareholders and financial analyst. The expected accuracy is more than 98% in this case and turnaround time to deliver the transcripts plays a very crucial role. Analysts call, Investors conferences, Product Launch conference all come under BT.

Scribie.com provides Business Transcription service.

Legal Transcription

Legat transcription is a specialized to transcribing depositions, court hearings and other law related proceedings. The desired accuracy is around 98-100%. Some courts require the transcripts to be certified for accuracy via an affidavit. Most of the times the transcripts have to be formatted in a specific manner as well. There many be a number of participants as well as the topic is varied. Knowledge of legal terminology is required for this type of transcription.

We provide the draft transcripts for legal transcription. The transcript can be checked for accuracy using our Integrated Editor and certified by a lawyer if required.

Interview Transcription

Interview Transcription, as the name suggests covers the general category and does not fall in any of the above mentioned ones. These are generally recordings made of interviews conducted face-to-face or over the phone. There may be two or more speakers one of whom is the interviewer. The others are interviewees who respond to the questions asked. The transcripts are an intermediate product and is used as an input for a larger product such as an article or a research study. There are several sub-categories of Interview Transcription, e.g. Podcast Transcription,  Focus Group Transcription, Academic Transcription.

We cover all kinds of Interview Transcription. We also categorize ourselves as a general transcription service.

Transcription Types at Scribie.com

To conclude, we provide services for Interview, Legal and Business Transcription. The only service we do not provide are Medical Transcription at this time. We follow a very strict formal process to prepare the transcripts which ensures that the accuracy is 98% or more. Try out our service today for yourself to check.

Starting today, you can also order a subtitle file along with the transcript. The subtitle file will be formatted as SBV file which is the format used by YouTube. The additional charge for subtitling is $1.00 per minute of audio. This option can be enabled from the payment page. If you plan to always order subtitles, then you can configure this option to be enabled by default from the settings page.

The subtitle file can be used directly as the YouTube caption file. It can also be converted easily to other formats such as SRT and used with other video players such VLC or the WebVTT format which is the format used by HTML5 complaint browsers. There are various online converters available. You can also contact us if you require any help with the conversion.

Now you can save even more on your transcription costs with our discount coupons. Starting today, you can apply coupon codes and get a discount for your transcript orders. Press the coupon button on the invoices page, enter the coupon code and press Apply button to get the discount.

The coupon codes will be published regularly in our mailing list. Contact support if you want to be on that list.

For our regular users, we are are starting a new discount policy effective today. If you order more than 10 hours in a month (separately or together), then we’ll send you a discount coupon which you can use for your next set of orders. The coupons will be valid for 30 days and will be automatically mailed to your account email address.

Please do let us know if you have any questions. Feedback and comments are most welcome.

QuickPay is our one-click payment system where you can choose to save your credit card details and use that for future payments. The credit card credentials are stored securely in the vault provided by our payment gateway provider; Braintree Payments. The valut is PCI Level 1 compliant and your credentials are safe there.

The QuickPay payment option is presented in the invoice page while ordering the transcript. Each saved card is listed and you can choose one of the cards to make the payment from. The QuickPay cards can also be added or removed from the Settings page.

We have tried to keep the transcript ordering process as simple as possible. The QuickPay option makes it even simpler for you to get a high quality transcript of your audio file. Please upload a file and try it out today.

We have now enabled file trimming on Scribie.com. If you have a audio file and need only parts of it transcribed then you can trim the audio file and remove the unwanted parts before placing the order, thus saving your costs.

The Trim File option is available from both, the Uploaded Files and Invoice pages (named as Time Range, last option). It brings up a dialog which prompts you to enter the start and end time stamp. The audio file is trimmed to contain only the portion between start and end. A new file is created and placed in your files page. The original file is kept intact and can be use to create further trimmed files. The trimmed file can then be ordered.

Try it out today. As usual, feedback/comments are most welcome.

Dropbox is a popular cloud storage service and it’s not surprising therefore that many customers have asked for the ability to import files directly from Dropbox to their Scribie.com account for transcription. We have now added Dropbox Importer to our uploader. Visit the following link to try it out.

https://scribie.com/files/upload#dropbox

The first step is to connect to your Dropbox account and authorize Scribie Uploader to access your files. After authorization, the uploader will search for supported audio/video files and present a list of the files found. You can then select the files which and upload them to your Scribie.com account. Once uploaded, you can place the transcript order. The authorization step has to be performed only once and the Dropbox account will stay connected till you logout from your Scribie.com account or manually disconnect it.

Along with this update, we have also revamped our file uploader. We have added support for Drag and Drop which is supported in HTML5 browsers. Visit the following link with the latest version of Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome to try it out.

https://scribie.com/files/upload#files

For the best performance we recommend latest version of Google Chrome.

We are planning to add importers for Google Drive and Box.net soon. If you want your favorite online storage service then please leave us a comment. We’ll work on adding support for that.