The Future of Audio Transcription: Can AI Replace Humans
Are human transcription services at risk of being taken over by artificial intelligence?
Audio transcription is the process of converting audio files into written documents. If your business maintains vast quantities of audio or video recordings, then you need to transcribe this content accurately and effectively. There are two types of transcription services that can be used in the entire process: human transcription and automated transcription.
Human transcription is carried out by real people who listen to an audio file and transcribe it to text.
Automated transcription or AI transcription uses speech recognition technology to convert audio files into text documents. In AI transcription services, Artificial Intelligence is implemented by preparing specialized algorithms with vast and high-quality data sets and validation samples. As more and more training data are being introduced to the software, by making the best of existing data, it gathers more knowledge and creates a more robust speech to text conversion algorithm.
Should you hire a human transcriptionist instead of using an automated transcription service to transcribe your data? To answer this question let’s see the advantages of AI transcription services over humans.
AI Transcription vs Human Transcription
Time-saving Automation and Efficiency
Across the business world, reducing time is almost as important as spending on prices. The automated transcription process, which depends on automatic-speech-recognition (ASR) software, not only provides decreased running costs by its usage, but also offers the gift of precious time to people like transcriptionists and stenographers. This reduces the processing period from days to just minutes to generate audio transcripts.
Reduce Transcription Costs
AI transcription helps in saving a huge amount of money as you don’t have to outsource transcription services. It is cost-effective. And it also allows professionals to invest their time into the top prioritized tasks. For example, our AI transcription service is one-hundredth of the cost of the popular human transcription service (SpeechText.AI = $0.05/min, Rev.com = $1.25/min).
Confidentiality and Data Security
Holding details secure from digitally prying eyes and remaining protected from possible data threats is of utmost importance to all companies. Hence, AI transcription services ensure you the guarantee that all of your sensitive knowledge is protected. With automated transcription services your privacy is in safe hands: the process has no place for human-factor and other risks that manual transcription has and you can always delete all transcription results.
Transcription Accuracy
Last month, Facebook introduced an improved framework for self-supervised speech recognition and made the bold claim that its AI algorithm is now almost as accurate as human transcriptionists. Wav2Vec 2.0 model achieved a word error rate of 1.9% (~98% accuracy) on the open source Librispeech dataset. But the speech recognition technology is still challenged: notably non-native speaker accents and very noisy speech. The biggest advantage human transcriptionists have over AI transcription tools is their natural ability to detect multiple speakers talking at the same time, identify slang, and filter through background noise.
Customization
AI transcription enables you to fulfill your needs with the help of customization options. You would have access to different sorts of file types, transcription languages, speech recognition models, and editing options. Plus, AI transcription service is accessible at all times regardless of time zone differences and fixed business hours, you can use it anytime you want.
As we see automated transcription beats human transcription in almost every way except accuracy. It’s much secure, faster, and cheaper than human transcriptionists. But you might have to spend some time cleaning up your automatically generated transcripts, especially if audio files include background noise.
