No we don’t. All our transcription is done by humans, listening carefully to your recording and typing it out as they hear it.
There are other services available on the internet that do use artificial intelligence and they are becoming increasingly powerful, but the problem with AI at the moment is that it is not technically advanced enough to determine the nuances of regional accent, dialects and mannerisms. So for example a computer is not going to be able to detect a Welsh name, such as Machynlleth, and neither is it going to be able to detect the use of a localism such as “me bab” (Leicestershire, UK).
Automated dictation software has been around for almost 30 years, but transcription companies like TP Transcription Limited still exist and increase their turnover year in year out. Why? Simply because AI is not powerful enough yet to replace human transcribers due to all the nuances and non-standard speech patterns that most research and academic interviews involve.
We can see a time when for general dictation artificial intelligence is clearly the future, and it is likely to be an area where the role of the transcriptionist could become redundant, simply because systems will be in place that enable customers to record, press a button and instantly receive back a transcript of everything they have just said with a sufficient accuracy level to use. Are we far off this? Who knows – people have been telling us that our services are redundant for many years, yet we are still here and busier than ever.
We understand at the moment AI transcription has an accuracy rate of about 40-45%, and it is used in tandem with human transcribers to complete the transcription once the computer has had a go. We have also heard that with transcription involving regional accents or difficult to pronounce localised words, the level of accuracy for the artificial intelligence is considerably less and in fact online services involving an element of AI such as Rev.com will not complete recordings that sound complicated (we’ve tested it).
We recommend trying us out as expert transcriptionists with almost 20 years experience and the capacity to handle very large ongoing academic research projects, as well as the day to day dictation of our clients. Get in touch at www.universitytranscriptions.co.uk for our academic services, and www.tptranscription.co.uk for our business services. We are a cyber essentials company and Transcription Society members.
