Scribie.com

So, you have an audio file which needs to be transcribed to text and have no idea how to go about it. Here’s how to do it.

The first thing you would need is ExpressScribe. It’s a free tool which enables quickly to start/stop/pause playback with hotkeys (or foot pedals) so that your hands are freed up for typing. To setup the hotkeys go to Control -> Hotkeys setup and enter your preferred keys. We suggest the following.

• F7 -> rewind
• F8 -> forward
• F9 -> play
• F10 -> stop

The useful thing is that these hotkeys are global. So you can control ExpressScribe even if it’s not the active application, which means you can type, play, stop, rewind, and forward without leaving your text editor. Very useful. Load up a test file and play around with the setup.

The second thing you would need is a good headset. Transcription is time consuming and when you wear it for long periods of time you may start feeling a bit of pain around your ears. Any headset with some padding around the earpiece will do. Do not play it on your speakers because then you will make lots of mistakes.

The third thing you would need is a text editor. You can use Word, OpenOffice.Org or any other editor of your choice. At a minimum it should have word completion and spelling auto-correction. While typing you’ll find that you misspell lot of words and to correct them you’ll have to stop and go back constantly. Auto-correction will save you time. Similarly auto-completion will save you typing, at least for common words.

Once everything is set up, you’re good to go. Bring up your editor, play the file, pause and type whatever you understood. Play-pause-type. Rinse and repeat till the file is complete. One pro-tip is try not to rewind too much. Rewind as few times as possible. Better still, instead of rewinding just mark the inaudible portion with a blank or make a guess, and after you’re finished go back and review the file. You’ll finish the file faster this way.

On an average it takes around 4 to 6 hours to finish 1 hour of audio. It varies by your typing speed,  the audio file quality and/or the diction of the speaker. Difficult files take longer. Plus, you’ll notice sometimes you cannot catch a few words, no matter how many times you rewind and play it back. Ask for a second opinion if you can.

As you would have guessed by now, it’s a painstaking task. It takes a lot of time and effort. That is exactly why we have the Audio Transcription Service. We do all the work for you and deliver a high quality transcript after 1 business day. For $75 you can get an hour of audio transcribed. We have a rigorous process and have transcribed over thousands of hours of audio to date. Try it out and check out the results for yourself.

On the other hand, if you like transcribing then check out our Freelance Transcription Program. You can work as a homebased freelance transcriber and get paid on an hourly basis for the work done.

If you’re looking to sell our your own e-book then have a look at Jared’s post at Startups Open Sourced. He’s had great success with it and has written up a detailed how-to of the steps involved. One of his tips is, get your interviews recorded and hire a transcriber to transcribe everything which you can work off.

One of the things to remember while hiring a transcriptionist keep in mind the difference between audio hour and man hours, which Jared mentions in his post. An hour of audio can take anywhere from 4 to 6 hours to transcribe. If you’re paying by the hour then your cost will basically be multiplied by that factor. On the other hand if you’re paying by the audio hour, then the amount of effort spend does not matter. You’ll pay for the amount of audio transcribed and not time taken for it to transcribe.

On Scribie.com we charge always by the audio hour. You don’t have to worry about the amount of actual time taken. Even if the audio is hard to transcribe and takes a more effort, you wont have to pay extra. At the end of the day you’ll still get a high quality transcript of your audio file.

Due to an incorrectly configured SSL certificate on our server browsers were showing an security warning whenever any secure pages on Scribie.com were accessed. We have corrected the configuration now and the security warning should go away. If you had faced the issue then please try now. Technical details follow.

The problem was that the intermediate certificates supplied by our CA was not specified. When we moved our domain to Scribie.com we also changed over from Apache to Nginx. In Apache the intermediate certificates where specified by the SSLCertificateChainFile directive. But Nginx does not have a corresponding directive. In Nginx the intermediate certificates have to combined into the server certificate PEM file. Once we did that, the security warning went away.

The odd part was we had run into the same error when we did the domain transition and were testing it out. But that error went away when we did force reloads of the page. So we thought it was an intermittent error which would go away eventually. But it did not and one of our users complained about it yesterday. In the end it turned out to be a simple fix.

If you run into the situation where you recorded a Skype call with CallGraph but you can hear only one side of the conversation when you play it back, then there are two things you can do.

1. Check if CallGraph has been authorized to connect to Skype. Without Skype authorization CallGraph cannot access the voice data from the Skype call and therefore cannot record the other side of the conversation. Skype authorization process can be sometimes tricky. If you face any issues then check the post on troubleshooting tips.
2. If authorization has been done, then try setting the recording mode to mono from configuration -> general tab and recording another test call. CallGraph records by default in stereo mode where your once and everyone else’ voice is encoded on different tracks. Unfortunately some PC’s are not configured correctly to play such files and you can hear only one track during playback. In mono mode both channels are mixed into a single track.

Once CallGraph has been authorized to connect to  Skype it should be able to record both sides of the conversation just fine.