We offer a bespoke personal service to our clients. If we cannot complete a transcription due to the standard of the recording we will always let our clients know and try to think of solutions round any problems to get their recordings into document format. We offer a truly bespoke and personal service, which others will promise but not deliver.
A recent example of our bespoke service is as follows.
The ‘Difficult To Hear’ Focus Group
A longstanding university client who had a focus group with over 10 speakers that they really wanted transcribing due to the content. We have been working with this university for over 15 years and we promised to give it our best when the lecturer sent the recording across.
Firstly one transcriber listened to the recording, and had a go at detecting the spoken word. Unfortunately she was unable to pick up much at all as the recording device had not been placed in the centre of the room and neither had our client followed our standard guide for recording a focus group – click here for details of how to record a focus group.
As a result the recording was very poor and extremely hard to hear. We passed the recording on to a second transcriber to see if she could manage to glean some or all of the content from the recording and get it into a word document. Unfortunately this was not possible again. The second transcriber experienced the same difficulties as the first one and was unable to complete the work.
Our transcription manager then took the recording under her wing and employed sound enhancing software to try and draw out some of the voices by boosting various frequencies as opposed to others. Unfortunately although a few of the words were detectable, the vast majority was not and without more detail it was impossible to make much sense of the recording.
However at this point the transcription manager then came up with another solution for the client which was quite unique to this particular recording. The lecturer had been present in the room when the recording had taken place and had also taken some notes to go with the recording, which meant she had a good idea of what had been said throughout the recording and was probably the most able person to actually draw out some of the content. We suggested she got another recording device, played the original recording to herself and then pause every 20 seconds to dictate the content as she remembered it into a new recording which we would then transcribe. This recording is so important to the university in question that they decided to do this and as a result the lecturer in question is currently dictating the recording into a new file for us to transcribe. The benefit of this is that as it is dictated and not a focus group it is considerably cheaper and it does mean that the university gets something out of the recording as opposed to nothing.
This is an example of our bespoke service. We have not charged our client for any of this work so far. This client has been with us for over 15 years and we want to give her and her department the best service we can. If you use an online transcription platform and they cannot pick out the words you will have the recording returned to you immediately without explanation. Here at universitytranscriptions.co.uk we go the extra mile and actually put the effort into trying to solve any problems. Some recordings are so important that this type of service is invaluable and if you have a similar problem with a file on a difficult to hear recording let us know and we would be delighted to have a listen for you and see if we can assist.
For details of our bespoke service for academic transcription please visit www.universitytranscriptions.co.uk.
