KimHaas.com Transcription Coaching, Blogs and Articles
December 12 2009
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Transcription Without Typing
With today’s advances in technology, speech recognition software makes it possible for people to bypass the keyboard completely. This type of software has helped people with disabilities by giving them the freedom to use the Internet, communicate via email, and create documents and letters even though they cannot type. There are several speech recognition programs on the market today, the most notable being Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking. Although this kind of software requires some initial training, accuracy increases over time with usage. In the transcription world, this software can also enable people to earn a living, or at least supplement their existing income.
You’re probably wondering how much money you can make in a day using speech recognition software. Actually, the income possibilities are only limited by the amount of work you can churn out in a day. The more transcripts you can produce, the better your income will be. Again, production is an issue, so depending on how accurate your software is and how well you’ve got it trained will play a major factor in the amount of income you can generate.
Producing quality transcripts is important in getting and keeping any transcribing jobs. If you plan on using speech recognition software to help you transcribe, you must take into consideration how well the software will be in recognizing your commands. Proofreading becomes even more important to catch errors under these circumstances. The software’s accuracy would be determined by how clearly you speak, any background noise in your working environment, and your computer’s speed.
For single speaker files, speech recognition software could be a real timesaver. You could easily create a new user account for the one voice and let the software do its thing in the background while you are working on other tasks. Of course again, there’s always the corrections that need to be done for a polished document.
Re-dictating multiple speaker files would be necessary since most speech recognition software cannot distinguish between multiple voices. If you’re blessed with the skill of being able to listen and talk at the same time, repeating what is being said, you could conceivably re-dictate multiple speaker files with ease. Otherwise, the time involved in re-dictating audio files could be quite time consuming, which in turn would slow your production abilities.
I don’t think transcribers need to view speech recognition software as a threat to their jobs for quite some time to come. Speech recognition software does not yet have the ability to properly punctuate a sentence. It is not currently equipped with a ‘common sense detector’ to distinguish between ‘they’re, there, and their’ for proper grammatical structure. Multiple speakers’ voices generally cannot be distinguished by the software at this time, so if you’re a transcriber, you can take a big sigh of relief. Your transcription jobs are safe from being totally automated by computers (for now).
About the Author:
Kim Haas has been working online since the Internet was a series of BBS systems. She is a successful writer and is currently working from home as a professional freelance transcriptionist.
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Posted by Kim Haas on 12/12 at 09:51 PM
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