Transcription System: Workflow

This is a series on Scribie.com’s audio transcription system. The first part which provides an overview is here. 

Our workflow consists of five steps.

File Splitting -> Transcription -> Review -> Proofreading -> Delivery

We start by splitting the file into smaller parts. The file is split at the 6 minute boundary which produces one or more files of duration 6 minutes or shorter. This is the first little innovation of our transcription process. File splitting breaks down the work into smaller manageable chunks. It helps in many ways. The file can be worked on parallelly by number of transcribers. A huge amount of effort is not wasted if one part has to be re-done. Additionally, we can track the progress precisely.

Transcription is the typing part. On an average it takes around 15-20 minutes to transcribe a 6 minute file. For a lot of our transcribers–who are mostly home-based freelancers–this is not a huge investment of time. Therefore splitting increases the likely hood that the file will be transcribed quickly. In fact on an average it takes around 1 to 1.5 hours to complete the transcription part of a one hour file!

The accuracy of the transcript is very low at this stage; typically around 50 to 80%. Therefore we do a review. The transcript is checked against the audio and all mistakes are corrected. Time-coding and speaker tracking is also added at this stage. Review usually takes 5 to 8 minutes of effort. But it takes longer for all the parts to get reviewed because we have fewer reviewers than transcribers. This is by design since we promote only our best transcribers to reviewers. The review drastically improves the accuracy.

Once all parts are transcribed and reviewed, we can combine them together and prepare the final transcript. However one more round of review is required here. That’s because, since different parts are worked on by different people, there are bound to be inconsistencies. Proofreading is done by a one person who goes through all the parts together and corrects them. The proofreader is an employee of CGBiz LLC (our company). They are the best of the best we have. We train them and pay them a monthly salary rather than an hourly rate.

The transcript is almost done now. However things might not be perfect even now. The proofreader can make mistakes, some more research may be required for certain terms, etc. So before the delivery we do some random checks. We try to gauge whether the quality is indeed at the level we want it to be. We also use keyword analysis (tf-idf to be precise) to identify out-of-context terms and inconsistencies. We review it again if we are not happy with it. Over time we have found that a small percentage of files require re-review; around 2%. Those are generally the most difficult of files.

Once we are satisfied that the transcript is perfect, as best as it can be, we deliver the file. The file is converted into MS Word, Adobe PDF, OpenOffice Text and plain text formats and we notify the customer that the transcript is available for download.

All of the above happens in 1 day and is managed by our transcription system. We charge only $0.99 per minute of the audio for it. So if you want to get a high quality transcript quickly, please do try out our transcription service today.

The next part of the series talks about the Certification Subsystem.