Demand for accurate transcripts has pushed the industry to expand rapidly. Market experts expect the industry to grow by as much as 17% annually until 2032. Transcription companies now play a crucial role in legal, medical, law enforcement, online marketing, and more industries, providing them with several benefits at affordable prices. If you own a business and haven’t outsourced your transcription needs, you might want to learn if the service fits you and what benefits you’re missing out on.
Benefits of Transcription Services
Let’s start with the most important aspect: the benefits. There’s no real reason for any company or government agency to hire transcription services if they don’t stand to gain from the partnership. So, let’s look at these various benefits and see if they fit your business goals.
Cost Savings
Outsourced transcription companies offer an excellent way for various companies and organizations to save money. Let’s list them out here:
- Saving money on hiring: It takes an average of $10,000 to find and hire a suitable candidate for most positions. Transcriptionists may take less or more, depending on the experience requirements your organization may have.
- No salary package and benefits: Transcription is a specialized task, and not every company has options for lateral employee movement if transcription dries up. The median salary for transcriptionists in the US is about $37,000, with more experienced candidates earning $65,000. Tack on another 30 or 40% for other benefits. Outsourcing allows companies to avoid the headache of providing salaries and benefits for new transcriptionists.
- Fewer workspace requirements: Most sources claim employees need about 60 to 100 square feet of office space for optimum productivity. However, office space is at a premium nowadays, and providing adequate room for in-house transcribers to perform their tasks is an additional, avoidable expense.
- No need to provide equipment: If you outsource your transcription needs, you no longer need to provide office equipment for in-house transcriptionists. That means a few thousand dollars of savings for every would-be employee that can be used for other, more important business requirements.
Time Savings
Transcription services will save you time. Without them, you’d have to listen and type recordings yourself. Sure, you might be quick on the keyboard, however, when transcribing, it’s not about how fast you type, rather, it’s how well you listen and how fast you type. Sure, I can type fast, covering a lot of lines in a short time, and this is also how mistakes happen. There have been countless times when our transcriptionists have been flying through a recording and needed to go back to fix phrases that were said or words that were spelled wrong.
Transcribing audio files usually takes our professional transcriptionists 4 hours for every one hour of transcription. After that, the resulting transcript must be reviewed and scrubbed of any errors before use. (Remember: inaccurate transcription can have very serious ramifications.) All that time spent could be better allocated to higher-value tasks relative to your operations.
Accuracy and Efficiency
Accuracy is a vital aspect of transcription because, as I said earlier, errors can have profound effects. This is important across the board; it doesn’t matter if you’re a lawyer needing court transcripts or a digital marketing agency looking for video transcription, we’ll get into specifics later. Companies have expansive training and rigorous QA protocols to ensure accurate results. Most instances offer above 90% accuracy; however, more experienced transcription providers like Ditto Transcripts guarantee >99% accuracy for all projects.
Focus on Strengths
Without needing to do transcription, you can dedicate energy to core operational competencies that push your business forward. A law firm can concentrate on legal work rather than transcribing depositions. Healthcare providers can focus on patient care instead of documentation. Police officers can devote their attention to their surroundings instead of looking down at their laptops and typing away while on patrol. Transcription through professional services brings expertise and efficiency at reasonable costs. This allows your business to work smart by leveraging an affordable service for non-core tasks.
Scalability
Quality transcription services handle projects of all sizes. You can send individual files or hundreds of hours of recordings—they can take it. This circles back to hiring in-house transcribers and how transcription demands can drop or surge at different times. You don’t need to get tangled in overtime requirements and workforce scheduling nightmares. Have as little or as much work sent to a trusted provider with little to no fuss.
How Professional Transcription Can Help Improve Business Processes
Let’s look at a few examples of how transcription can help in different industries.
Legal
The legal industry relies heavily on accurate transcripts. Transcribers create verbatim transcripts of legal proceedings, depositions, and meetings. These transcripts become official legal records and can be used in court proceedings. Lawyers use transcripts of depositions to find contradictions in witness testimony or prepare for trial. Transcripts also ensure crucial conversations, arguments, and testimony are documented word-for-word. Legal teams also transcribe client meetings, witness interviews, and phone calls. This provides a written record of verbal exchanges and agreements. Lawyers can quickly search transcripts to find relevant information.
Medical
Medical transcription companies can transcribe doctor-patient conversations, telehealth appointments, meetings, single person narratives, and letters to referring doctors. These transcripts are added to patient files, enabling doctors to review visit details.
Transcripts also improve continuity of care between different providers. Doctors can reference transcripts to see patient history discussions and recommended treatments. Furthermore, transcription also enables secure communication between care providers. Medical professionals can exchange written transcripts instead of relying only on in-person conversations.
For instance, one of our clients reviewed a transcript of a family practice doctor’s appointment with a patient. This allowed the specialist to provide input without requiring the patient to schedule a separate visit. Recording and transcribing service calls also help resolve issues. In this case, a transcript can prove that a patient qualifies for an approved treatment, resolving the dispute.
Business
Business transcripts support a range of functions. Meetings, conferences, company wide calls, and events are transcribed to share information efficiently. Upwork conducted a study, and they found that 22% of American employees are expected to work remotely by the end of 2025.
Executives use call transcripts to see analysts’ questions and management’s responses. They help assess company performance and strategies. Transcripts also provide meeting notes even when an employee can’t attend. And new hires can read transcripts to get up to speed on past meetings quickly.
Business negotiations and legal proceedings can also be transcribed to have written records of discussions. This prevents potential misunderstandings and disputes later on.
Media
The media industry uses transcription to add text versions of audio recordings and video content.
Transcripts of interviews, podcasts, and videos enable media content to be indexed, searched, shared, and analyzed. This improves the SEO score and makes this published content more visible.
Transcripts can also offer accessibility features for audio or video marketing content. Subtitles and captions allow those who are hard of hearing to enjoy your content.
Media companies use transcripts to create articles based on video interviews. It’s a classic two-birds-with-one-stone situation, where little effort is required to turn speeches and interviews into blogs for additional online visibility.
Academic
Schools use transcription for lectures, discussions, classes, and events. These transcripts allow students to participate even if they can’t attend a session or need language assistance. Transcripts also facilitate effective studying and note-taking. Students can use transcripts to supplement their own notes instead of relying on their incomplete notes.
Transcripts can also be used for conducting research. Researchers can record participant interviews and convert them into searchable written text formats, making them easier to classify and archive.
Types of Transcription
There are various types of transcription services available; let’s examine some of the most common ones.
Verbatim Transcription
Verbatim transcription captures every word verbatim from audio and video recordings. This includes ums, ahs, pauses, and even background noises. Verbatim is important for law enforcement, legal, or medical records requiring complete accuracy and may contain filler words for additional context.
Cleaned-up Transcription
Edited transcripts are refined verbatim transcriptions. The transcriptionist corrects grammar, removes filler words, and adds punctuation to improve readability. Edited transcripts create cleaner, easier-to-read, shared documents, which works well for internal business documents.
Summarized Transcription
Summarized transcripts condense conversations to key points. The transcriptionist summarizes the overall narrative in clear and concise paragraphs. Summarized transcripts provide fast, high-level overviews. Executives can quickly understand meeting key takeaways.
Time-Stamped Transcriptions
Time-stamped transcripts tag the time in the original recording when each line occurs. Readers can easily jump to relevant sections. Legal and medical teams often want time stamps to reference exact points in audio. This assists in information lookup.
AI Transcription vs. Manual Transcription
Automated speech recognition (ASR), speech-to-text transcription programs, and AI transcription software are available almost everywhere. However, they’re inaccurate, which defeats the purpose of finding accurate, high-quality transcripts. The best transcription providers are usually human-powered or manual transcription companies – like Ditto.
They can leverage their experience and listening skills to create more accurate transcripts. Moreover, they can utilize contextual understanding and deep language skills to provide intelligent verbatim transcripts even if unsure of a certain passage or pronunciation.
Manual transcription turnaround times can be long (although reliable transcription companies offer reasonable timeframes). They’re not as fast as automated transcription with their instantaneous results. However, accuracy should never be sacrificed. Video or audio transcription requires high precision, regardless of its use.
AI can be an excellent tool for specific tasks. Transcription is not one of them. It has problems transcribing audio and visual content with multiple speakers, longer audio content, low-quality audio clips, or words and phrases that sound like many other words (try to use speech-to-text in British English and see for yourself).
Hybrid edited transcription (AI transcripts checked by human proofreaders) is often said to be the answer, yet error-filed transcripts can take as long to correct as they would if a human had done it in the first place.
Transcripts Are Great Tools To Help Your Business
Transcription plays a vital role in many business operations and has a multitude of benefits for many different industries. However, reliable, home-grown US based transcription companies offering high-quality transcripts with near-perfect accuracy rates are always your best bet.
Ditto Transcripts is a HIPAA- and CJIS-compliant, Denver, Colorado-based transcription company that provides fast, accurate, and affordable transcription services to companies and agencies of all sizes. Call (720) 287-3710 today for a free quote, and ask about our free five-day trial. Visit our website for more information about our transcription services.
