Is there anything AI can’t do these days?
Well yes, lots of things. But one thing it can do is record and transcribe things for you automatically. So you can have a phone call, and then see the transcription of what was said later on. Cool huh?
Well, kind of. Because if we’re honest, AI audio transcription really isn’t that great. In fact, most people who use it end up having to do it themselves or coming to a VA to get an accurate transcription of their audio. Since this is something we’ve been dealing with a lot recently, we wanted to shed some light on why having a human being transcribe your audio is still better than using automatic call transcription software, or AI models.
Why Are Human Beings Better?
Sure, automatic call transcription software and AI platforms are fast. You can feed in your audio and in just a few minutes it will spit out a transcription for you. But if you’ve ever tried one of them before, you’ll know that the accuracy rate is around 40-50%, and that’s on a good day! You’ll then have to spend time getting the transcript polished up before it’s ready to use – by which point you may as well have done it yourself!
But that’s not all. There are a couple of other reasons human beings (and VAs specifically) are better suited to call transcription and general transcription work. Including:
Formatting: There are dozens of different ways to format audio conversations, and it will all depend on what you’re using the transcription for and the industry you are in. With a call transcription tool, you only get one format option, and that’s what you have to deal with. Using human beings you can choose the format of your transcription, so the work will be presented to you exactly as you need it to be. The more you work with your transcriber, the better they will understand your specific word choices, phrases and formatting choices, and the better your results will be.
Noise: It’s very rare for audio recordings to be perfect. Often there will be noise in the background, other people speaking, coffee machines going off, and traffic noise. You name it! All of this can result in interference on the audio, which AI call transcription software isn’t very good at filtering out. At best this means there will be big chunks of your audio that are simply missing from the transcript, and at worst you will have pieces of other people’s conversations leaking into your transcript, and when background noise is particularly bad you will simply have a jumble of words. A real person can filter out the irrelevant background noise and focus on the speakers easily, taking away all of that confusion and leaving you with a clean, clear transcription.
Security: Using apps or call transcription software to transcribe your work could leave you vulnerable in ways you don’t even know. Your data will be stored on servers, probably forever, in an unknown location depending on where the software provider is. So you never really know whether or not your data is secure. With a VA you know exactly where your data is, who is accessing it and what will be done with it when you no longer need it.
Accuracy: We hinted at this in the noise section, but a lot of automatic call transcription software really isn’t very accurate. It’s notoriously bad at understanding regional accents, and will often get confused with a lot of background noise, leading to jumbled letters instead of clear transcription. AI also doesn’t understand acronyms and jargon very well, which can lead to some interesting results when it guesses what to include instead. A VA is a real person listening to the audio, which means you’re going to get much higher accuracy the first time around, saving you a lot of time in fixing it later on!
Using a VA for Transcription
At Your Admin Hub some of our bread-and-butter work is audio typing. We can take any audio or video file you’ve created and provide you with an accurate text version, with fast turnaround times for those last-minute projects. So you will know exactly who said what, and at what time in the conversation. We’re on hand to take transcription work off your plate and give you the freedom to work on other things – knowing it’ll be finished and in your inbox before you know it.
If you’d like to know more about our audio typing services, just get in touch with the team today.