Scribie.com

We recently launched profiles for our certified transcribers. Here’s a screenshot of my profile.

It contains some background information, relevant professional experience and performance and work history on Scribie.com. It gives you an idea of who the transcriber is, how much work he or she has done and how has the work been. The profile is very basic right now but we will be adding more functionality to it soon.

So how is this useful? Well for starters you can check who worked on your files and how much time they spent working on them.

https://scribie.com/profiles/files

These stats are broken down on a per file basis as well. The stats section has the link.

https://scribie.com/transcripts

Additionally, if you’re happy with the result then you can choose to pay a bonus to our transcribers. These transcripts are prepared painstakingly and a bit of appreciation can go a long way! You can pay the bonus to the one’s who have worked on your files or an individual transcriber from their profile page. If you pay to the group then it’s divided up equally amongst all of them. We also do not keep anything for ourselves, except for a 5% charge to cover the fees. All of the money goes directly to the transcribers.

You can also browse all the transcriber profiles from here, the one’s which are public. We break it down in various lists: top 25 transcribers, reviewers, most active, by country etc. Have a look.

http://scribie.com/profiles/browse

Having your podcasts transcribed and publishing the text content on your website may sound unintuitive at first, but it has several advantages and is worth considering.

Reading vs Listening

Reading is a much faster process than listening. Many of your visitors would want to quickly scan through the transcript instead of listening to it. Some of these visitors might even end up as subscribers for your podcast. This goes for your regular listeners too. Sometimes they just might just want to scan the podcast quickly before deciding to listen to it.

Social Media Sharing

Having the complete text of the podcast online makes it easier for people to share it via Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and the myriad of social media sites which are there nowadays. Your listeners can quote a part of the text or highlight a particular section which they want to emphasize and share it with their own circle. Higher sharing rates means more traffic for your website and associated benefits.

Indexing & Search

The biggest advantage is that the search engines can now easily index your content since the text of the podcast is available. Better indexing will lead to more search traffic and more visitors to your site. You will also benefit from the long tail search traffic, those obscure terms for which your site appears on the search result. Your podcast might be linked by others which in turn will mean a higher Page Rank and even more search traffic.

Contextual Advertisements

If you are using Google AdSense then the transcripts will lead to better contextual advertisements being displayed on your site and higher earnings from AdSense for you. This happens because the Google AdSense crawler first mines the text content on your website and matches it to the ad’s. Since the text content will now be closely related to your niche or topic, your visitors will get to see more relevant advertisements and a higher click-through-rate for you.

E-book Packaging

Selling e-books based on the content of your podcasts is a direct way of monetizing your podcast. Once you have the transcripts it becomes an order of magnitude easier to create an e-book. There are various sites which help you sell digital information content,  ClickBank being one of the popular one’s. You can also sell these e-books to your listeners and visitors. An e-book is also a perfect freebie to give away if you want visitors to sign up for your newsletter.

There are several ways you can get your podcasts transcribed. If you are good typist you try transcribing yourself or outsource it via Scribie.com for $0.99 per minute of audio. It is ultimately an investment which will pay off very handsomely in the long run.

CallGraph Skype Recorder records by default in stereo mode which means that your voice and other participant(s) voice are on different tracks in the file. While playing back you will hear your voice on one side of the speaker while your caller/callee’s voice on the other side. To force CallGraph to record in a single track change the channels to mono from stereo. The option is in Configuration -> Recording tab.

This change will affect all subsequent calls recorded with CallGraph. For older one’s, you can convert them to mono using an audio editor (eg. Audacity).

The stereo mode is useful if you’re recording podcasts since you can edit each track separately. Having voices on separate track makes it order of magnitude easier to edit. It also helps with the transcription of audio file and we recommend that you record in stereo mode if you plan to get it transcribed.

Sometimes due to misconfiguration of the PC’s playback settings, only one track is audible during playback and it appears that CallGraph is recording only one side of the call, even though Skype connection has been authorized. A quick fix is to set the recording mode to mono.

We now offer two types of transcript: Draft and Proofread. If you plan to do a comprehensive review of the transcript then you can choose the Draft Transcript Type while ordering. The Draft Transcript is not time coded and the speakers are not tracked in it. It contains just the text of the audio file with each speaker’s diction paragraphed neatly.The rate for the Draft Transcript is $0.60 per minute. Therefore for a 1 hour file it will cost $36.

The Proofread Transcript on the other hand requires minimal or no editing on your behalf. This type of transcript is time coded and speakers are tracked with initials. The blanks are marked with a time-stamp to make it easy to locate it in the audio file and correct it. We also do a complete review. This includes researching any terms that might occur in the audio and finding out the correct usage, correcting mistakes,  filling in blanks, etc. We also ensure that the quality is as high as possible. The rate for the Proofread Transcript is $0.75 per minute of recorded audio. Therefore for a 1 hour file it will cost $45.

This gives you a bit more flexibility while ordering the transcript. The most time consuming part while transcribing an audio is typing; thats the heavy lifting part. In the Draft Transcript we do the heavy lifting for you and you can then review it and modify it as per your need.

We now offer only Proofread transcripts at $0.99 per minute of audio.

We have been fine-tuning our transcription process to improve the accuracy of the transcripts. Our process is a bit more involved from the usual transcription process where a person works on the complete file. Instead we split up the file into smaller parts and several transcribers and reviewers work on each part individually. The parts are then collated into the final transcript.

Our process tries to remove, to the extent possible, tediousness from the transcription work. Since files are small (around 6 minutes) a transcriber has to spend no more than 45 minutes to 1 hour on each file. Studies have shown that the average human concentration span is around that mark; a person can maintain the same concentration level on one task for no more than an hour, after which a break is required. Therefore splitting up files has an noticeable impact on the accuracy.

But this also introduces the problem of inconsistency. Since different parts are worked on by different people, a specific term which appears in one part may not appear the same way in the other parts. Our first approach for solving this problem was to use a dictionary. After the final transcript was done we used to cross check the file against a vocabulary of commonly occurring terms and correct the mistakes. But this approach only solved the problem partially since it was hard to catch all the inconsistencies.

The best we accuracy we could get to was around 95% with this process. But we wanted to improve it. So now, we have added another step of review. This final review is done by a single transcriber who goes through the entire file and corrects all the inconsistencies. We have been doing this since the past few months and have found this to be much more effective than the dictionary approach. Consequently our accuracy has gone up to 98 to 100%.

Because of the additional review step our costs have also gone up; from 50 cents per minute to 75 cents per minute. This rate has been in effect for around 3 months and we are quite pleased with the results. We are still around 25 to 50% cheaper than other professional transcription services available. That is the result of our transcription process and the system we have developed to manage it.

The increased price also gives a little bit flexibility. Therefore we have also started offering discounts for bulk orders. If you order for more than 10 hours at a time then you can avail a 10% discount on the total price. We will also initiate a seasonal discount program sometime in the future.

So try out our improved transcription service and order a transcript today!

Deliveries: The delivery slabs are now 3 days, 1 day and 12 hours instead of 7 days, 3 days and 1 day respectively. The rates remain the same.

Video Files: You can upload video files and have them transcribed. We support wmv, avi, flv, mpg, mp4 and mov files. The files are converted to mp3′s and then you can order transcripts.

URL Upload: Files can be uploaded by URL’s. Eg. YouTube links or podcast links.

Partial Transcripts: After ordering the transcript you can view partial transcripts. The option is in the actions menu in the transcripts page.

Order Cancellation: After the transcript order has been placed you can cancel the order and we’ll refund the applicable amount to you. The applicable amount is calculated from the transcript progress.

Tools: We have also added a slew of tools to modify/clean up the transcripts after they have delivered. The timestamps, speaker initials, blanks and all meta information can be removed. A simple find a replace tools has also been added. These options are available from the actions menu in the transcripts page. The transcript text can also be copied directly to the clipboard from as opposed to download the files.

Thank you for using Call Graph! Comments/feedback are most welcome.

Do you have a fast typing speed? Are you comfortable with American, UK and Australian accents of English? Are you interested in audio transcription?

Our Freelance Transcription Program is ideally suited for you. Our transcription process is partly automated and partly manual and we are looking for help in the manual part. All you need is a computer, internet connection and a good quality headset. We will tell you which tools to use and the way to do it. We’ll take a test and approve you if it matches our quality requirements. Thereafter you can start earning with Call Graph!

Please click here to check the details and apply.