Our world is all about information. Access to the information often defines if you can have a certain style of life. That’s why accessibility of information is the most essential achievement of today. With many forms of information delivery channels, it is easier to keep yourself informed. Unfortunately, not to everyone. Audio transcribing positive words help the hearing impaired.
A great share of information is spread orally – usual public communication, lectures, conferences, podcasts, audiobooks, videos, etc. This form has a lot of advantages, but essential drawbacks too. The biggest problem is that the information spread in the vocal form is almost inaccessible to hearing-impaired people.
Accessibility is one of the cornerstones of modern society. Big industries like broadcasting companies provide sign language interpretations and are adding subtitles to videos for their videos for deaf people. However, there is another way which is to transcribe audio to text. This method is excellent for all people who are more comfortable consuming the information in written form.
Implementing audio transcription: reasons and benefits
Assume you have made an excellent video and want to share it on YouTube, Vimeo, or other resources. You worked hard on video editing, effects, sound mixing. You would not like to lose a part of your audience, would you? Frankly speaking, it is not about the hearing-impaired people only. All people will benefit from the possibility to transcribe recordings.
What is audio transcription? In brief words, it is turning the speech into a written format. The possibility to get a quality text transcript of any speech is a blessing for many people.
Video and audio, though popular formats are far from being perfect. They imply many issues that can spoil the viewing and hearing processes for even those people who can hear just fine. Under such circumstances, having the text transcripts for your videos and audios is not just a pleasant bonus. It is a must for several reasons.
- It improves the clarity of information. Any person may have a tough time trying to delve into the audio contents. People speak too fast, indistinctly, or with heavy accents. There can be several speakers. The quality of the audio itself may be bad. The transcript of audio content eliminates all such problems, as you have the distilled information to consume.
- It simplifies working with the data. What if you need to refer to some detail from the podcast or lecture? You might need to find that resource, find the file, and run through the record, searching for the necessary section. Tags are making this job easier, but you can find the necessary piece in a transcript much faster.
- It saves the information. You may need to save the piece of information locally somewhere, but it might not be possible to download the video/audio file. Besides, such files, especially of high quality, consume a lot of space. It is much easier to save a text file of the audio transcription and refer to it whenever needed.
- It removes all technical issues with reproducing the records. Frequently, you can’t get smooth playing because your Internet connection is unstable. Besides, the video/audio put on pause often can “jump” to another position after getting re-activated, thus annoying the users. Will this happen to a text transcript? Of course, no.
For hearing-impaired people, having these transcripts means more than staying informed. It is a matter of being productive and successful.
It opens all the prospects for learning, as you can record lectures and webinars, get their audio transcripts, and educate yourself on the subjects using the most detailed information.
It also helps in work. You can get the necessary information from audio or video files faster. Listening to some podcasts can take hours, but you can read them several times faster, use keywords to search, make notes and remarks. With all benefits, the spoken format is inferior to the written one when the goal is to obtain the essence of the data.
In any case, for all users, audio transcripts make life a lot easier. There are specialized audio transcription services that make preparing those transcripts easier. But is it the best option to use?
Getting quality audio transcripts: where to turn?
The current technologies made an automated transcription service available to everyone. There are lots of apps that convert audio to text. Speech recognition technology becomes more powerful and precise each day. Still, even such a technological giant as Google is unable to transcribe audio text 100% accurately. Why?
There are regional accents and speaking problems, there are all shades of emotions in the speeches, and grammar spelling context that can easily change the meaning of the words spoken. Besides, even the best machine-learning systems make mistakes. As a rule, when you work with a text by automated conversion from speech to the written format, you have to revise it carefully. Most likely, there will be lots of issues to correct.
Many countries make it obligatory to provide audio transcripts for the audio and video materials. It is a part of governmental anti-discriminating policies. However, even if your area does not require it, providing text transcriptions demonstrates that you care about all your visitors (and it is great for SEO, as Google won’t define the contents of audio, but it can scan the text transcript and evaluate its quality).
When the quality of that audio transcript is essential to you, turning to professional human transcribers is the most logical way out. People who have appropriate training and experience surpass the machines in all aspects. They detect the mixtures of dialects, second meanings, accents, and right contexts.
Maybe in the future machines will become so advanced to convert any audio of any quality, with any number of participants and any kinds of pronunciation nuances flawlessly. However, it is not so with automatic audio transcription now. At the current moment, nothing can beat a trained human ear and the skills of understanding the contents.
Positive Words Research – How Audio Transcribing of Positive Words Help the Hearing Impaired