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.