Humans Are Better at Transcribing Than Robots
Audio transcription can be a long process, especially if you are a newbie in the field. For many, the automatic audio transcription offers an easy alternative. But is the shortcut worth taking? Statistics would not say so.
Express Scribe, an automatic transcription software, offers an accuracy of around 40 -60% when integrated with the Microsoft Speech Recognition. Google Voice, on the other hand, offers an approximately 80% accuracy but only while transcribing voicemails. That percentage goes significantly down for conversational speech audio. The appalling performance of the various automatic audio transcription or speech recognition software programs even today makes one think why it is so. The reasons are plentiful.
The software fails to factor in the various styles of speaking
A language changes its character depending upon who speaks it. For instance, the way English is spoken in the US is different from how people in India speak it. Teaching a software program how to recognize the variations in human intonations and accents can be very challenging. The problem multiplies when there are groups of speakers involved. Analyzing voice can be equally frustrating for a program. The ease with which the human ear can decipher the spoken words by a variety of voice quality, such as hoarse, soft, deep, etc., does not work in case of a software. In the ideal world, the speaker would have to speak clearly and carefully in order to be accurately transcribed by an automatic audio transcription system. But unfortunately, we don’t get to work in an ideal world scenario.
English can be a tricky language
Sale, sail. Year, ear. Feet, feat. You get the drift. Homophones can be quite tricky and sometimes becomes impossible to understand from a spoken language if we don’t understand the context. Quite obviously, this is a high expectation from a software, and this naturally leads to undesirable mistakes.
The better alternative
Hiring a transcription service with a team of experienced transcribers is still the best. Old is gold when it comes to accuracy, at least in this context. Scribie is completely powered by humans and hence is able to consistently maintain accuracy level of 99% or higher.
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