Human Transcription vs. Machine Transcription: A Brief Analysis

Over the last few decades, technology has considerably augmented business capabilities for competitive advantage and convenience. Due to automation, the majority of tasks performed by humans are now performed by robots, with minimal to no human assistance.

When it comes to choosing a transcription service, businesses have to decide whether to go for a professional human transcription service or rely on machine transcription. Let’s dive into some brief insights and learn which option is the better choice.

Human Transcription

Human transcription, as evident by the name, is done by real people. They listen to audio and transcribe it in the text form. Human transcription tends to produce more accurate results as compared to machine transcription.

Real people are able to decipher industry jargons and different accents more accurately. Moreover, they also perform better when it comes to transcribingaudio recordings which contain multiple speakers or background noise.

Human transcription is mainly used by medical organizations, law firms, insurance companies, public safety and health organizations, and the media industry. It’s also used in business operations where accuracy and authenticity is of paramount importance.

Machine Transcription

Machine transcription is performed by speech recognition software which converts audio recordings to text. Though the automated process makes the transcription process cheaper and faster, it’s far less accurate than human transcription.

Speech recognition can only work when there’s clear audio with no echo and minimum background noise. Even after that, it still requires human insight to ensure the accuracy of the transcript.

Machine transcription is typically used by graduate students, podcasters, radio stations, and people who don’t require high accurate transcription. It’s mostly used to search the audio for a few specific keywords or quotes.

Machine transcription is also widely used in medical industry, but it’s not as reliable as human transcription. Therefore, an additional thorough manual checking is necessary, which can be time-consuming.

Which option should you choose?

While it’s true that speech recognition technology has improved significantly over the last few years; it is no match when compared to human transcriptionists in terms of accuracy. The only way automated transcriptions beat human transcription is cost, but incorrect transcriptions can lead to a lot of expenses. Hence, machine transcription should only be used for rough drafts or transcribing extremely clear audio, which requires urgent transcription. Still, it will require a human check to ensure that it’s free from errors.

For businesses and professionals, it’s necessary to hire experienced transcription service provider as they can transcribe with an error rate or less than 1%. Moreover, their work is proofread and goes through multiple checks for accuracy, hence guaranteed to meet your demands for consistent, high quality and accurate transcriptions.

Looking for an accurate transcription service provider? Get in touch with Spectra Scribe.We provide reliable, high-quality transcription services to our clients in Canada. Using our systematic approach to accuracy and quality, we meet all accuracy compliance requirements of our clients and surpass their expectations. For more information on our professional transcription services, call us at 877-353-2703 or visit our website