What is Online Transcribe?
Online transcribe services provide internet-based translation of audio and video files to written text. Transcription services process various media formats into text transcripts for use in other services. For example, online transcription can provide subtitles for a video or deliver meeting notes with speaker attribution. Modern cloud-based transcription services use automatic speech recognition (ASR) with machine learning algorithms to provide accurate transcripts. Online transcription can be integrated with other services for better business intelligence. For example, moderating voice channels becomes easier with toxic audio detection, and customer service inquiries become data-led with call center analytics.
What are the types of online transcription services?
There are several types of online transcription services that organizations can use to convert speech to text.
Human transcription services
Human transcription services are workers who manually transcribe audio files into text. Due to the rise in automated transcription services, human transcribers are mainly only used in use cases that require extreme precision or deal with nuanced industry jargon. These use cases include academic research and the scientific industries. Human transcription is slower than machine transcription but typically very accurate.
Automated transcription services
Automated transcription services use speech recognition in AI models to convert audio data to text. AI models train on a wide variety of audio source data, enabling them to handle live transcription of different accents and industry contexts. Automated transcription services are a rapid and reliable option for organizations that need transcribed text.
Batch processing
Batch processing is a type of online transcription that processes a large number of pre-recorded files at once. Organizations use batch processing to transcribe a large number of files when the transcription time is not important.
Real-time transcription
Real-time transcription transcribes audio data into text in real-time. Automated transcription services enable effective real-time transcription, helping to transcribe meeting notes, live calls, and caption live videos. There are real-time human transcription services, mainly in the form of court stenographers.
What are some online transcription use cases?
Here is a selection of the numerous use cases of online transcription.
Meeting enhancement
Real-time digital transcription can transcribe video and audio meetings into transcripts. For people unable to attend the meeting, these transcripts serve as a way to recap the content. Automatic online transcription means that attendees don’t have to spend time writing meeting notes and taking minutes.
Call center analytics
Call centers can transcribe interviews and customer calls into documents for use in compliance and training. By analyzing transcribed documents, organizations can determine which customer problems are the most common. Organizations can combine this approach with sentiment analysis AI technology to better understand the content and success of customer support conversations.
Content creation
Organizations can use an online transcription service to convert audio files into various formats for other content tasks. For example, a company could use transcribed text from a webinar as the basis for a series of social media posts. Companies can rapidly create subtitles in multiple languages, enhancing video files with written subtitles for multi-national audiences.
Accessibility
For individuals who are unable to listen to audio or cannot hear, tools that transcribe content into written text significantly improve accessibility. With automatic and real-time transcription, organizations can improve the accessibility of their audio and video content by attaching live subtitles.
Medical transcription
Transcribing medical appointments allows patients to have a record of their conversations with doctors. These can help ensure patients know precisely what occurred during their doctor’s appointment and can refer back to the transcript if they forget anything. From a medical professional’s perspective, medical transcription can create a backlog of notes for compliance and auditing.
Legal transcription
A legal transcription service trains on the legal jargon needed to understand professionals in this field. Lawyers can transcribe client meetings and court proceedings for their own notes. Alternatively, courts can use automatic transcription software to generate live transcriptions of testimonies, alongside court stenographers, where the accuracy of transcripts is important.
What are the features of online transcription services?
The benefits of online transcription services will vary depending on the product they offer.
Background noise reduction
To understand the spoken word, many transcription services offer preprocessing that reduces background noise. These services are designed to make the transcription more accurate.
Audio and video transcription
An audio and video transcription service works across several different file formats, like MP3, MP4, WAV, and MOV. A multi-modal transcription service is useful due to its flexibility, helping organizations by transcribing any audio and video file across content types.
Multi-language support
Multi-language support is a common feature of leading online transcription services. By having the capacity to transcribe content in many languages, organizations can scale to serve customers all over the world. Some transcription services can also translate in real-time, providing video captions in the user’s language of choice.
Speaker identification
Speaker identification is an important feature of transcription services, especially when transcribing interviews. By identifying different voices in a recording, transcription software can more precisely identify who is speaking in interviews or lectures. This feature is often accompanied by the transcription time code next to the speaker so that individuals can follow along with the document in real-time.
Compliance features
Some transcription software will automatically identify sensitive information and prevent it from entering the transcript. For example, financial institutions may record customer calls but will use compliance features to hide any financial details in their transcripts. These features aim to help organizations align with regulatory compliance standards.
What are the security considerations of an online transcription service?
Data usage
If your organization uses an AI-enhanced online transcription service, you need to understand whether or not customer data is stored and used for further training. Make sure to trace how data is used and whether it is stored and used in long-term storage with the transcription provider, or whether it only moves through your organization.
Data storage
Mapping out where your online transcription service stores its data is an important way to maintain visibility over the residency of data in your organization. Visibility is extremely important, as depending on where your company is based, there will likely be data sovereignty requirements that you must fulfill. Equally, if a customer sends your organization a data deletion request, you need to be able to ensure that any third-party online transcription service deletes its data.
Encryption
When ingesting and processing audio or video data, organizations must determine whether encryption is required for the data. Audio and video data that requires encryption must be protected with modern encryption standards. Encrypting data both at rest and in transit prevents data hijacking and is a central part of complying with data protection standards.
Compliance and redaction
Any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is typically protected under central data protection and privacy regulations. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protects identifiable medical information. At the same time, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European consumer data protection law with a broader scope. Organizations need to be aware of any data protection and privacy regulations that their company must adhere to and customize their transcription tool accordingly.
Where possible, ensure that any sensitive PII is either removed from transcripts before they are published or censored in real-time. Companies must train their online transcription services to both recognize PII and remove it to ensure they protect their customers’ private information.
How can AWS support your online transcription requirements?
Amazon Transcribe is AWS's premier online speech-to-text conversion service.
Amazon Transcribe is a fully managed, automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for developers to add speech-to-text capabilities to their applications. It is powered by a next-generation, multi-billion-parameter speech foundation model that delivers high-accuracy transcriptions for streaming and recorded speech.
We also offer separate APIs that uniquely understand customer calls (Amazon Transcribe Call Analytics) and medical conversations (Amazon Transcribe Medical).
Get started with our online transcribe services on AWS by creating a free account today.