What’s missing in standard transcription solutions?

by Rajath DM | 11-21-2021

Transcription products turn audio and voice into a text transcript. Standard transcription is domain specific and you have to train the model, whereas intelligent transcription uses contextual understanding for higher accuracy. It’s domain agnostic, allows multiple formats, available in real time, offers speaker separation, and various output formats. Intelligent transcriptions can also be optimized with insights, action items, questions, topics, and trackers.

The use of voice and video for oral communication has seen an increase in popularity over the last decade, especially for workplace collaboration, customer service, and live events. But with the complexities of human speech and the growing need to analyze it for business insights, standard transcription just isn’t cutting it anymore.

Let’s take a quick dive into the world of transcription, why standard methods are falling short, and why intelligent transcription is the next step.

What is transcription?

Transcription is the process of converting audio and voice into a text transcript. This is also known as speech-to-text, or automatic speech recognition (ASR).

With speech recognition technology you can add real value to communication. With transcripts, note-taking can be faster and content more searchable and accessible. Also, transcripts allow for better knowledge sharing, can summarize conversations to catch valuable business insights, and help reduce costs of recording and storing conversation data.

There are two levels of transcription available on the market today:

  1. Standard speech-to-text transcription: Most providers can offer you basic transcription. This is often domain-specific and you’ll need to use data to train the AI model.
  2. Intelligent transcription: This uses contextual understanding for an almost “human” understanding of a conversation, including sentiments and even cultural context. It’s also domain agnostic, which means it can comprehend speech and conversations that occur in any context.

Why intelligent transcription is better than basic transcription

  • Sync and async formats: Standard transcription doesn’t offer you multiple formats, such as asynchronous and synchronous (telephony, WebSockets), whereas intelligent transcription offers both.
  • Higher accuracy: Transcription accuracy is a challenge for standard transcription because there is no contextual information. Intelligent transcription is able to add real value as you benefit from features such as punctuation (making it more readable with sentence separation), and entity recognition (e.g. it can identify names, times, dates, and places).
  • Speaker separation: Intelligent transcription is able to offer speaker separation for multiple speakers. This is not easy to emulate in standard transcription. With intelligent transcription, even if you cannot identify separate speakers, you can emulate this by using different channels and speaker events.
  • Multiple output formats: Intelligent transcription can offer you output format options: both SRT format (standardized for video captions and subtitles) and Markdown (easy to publish in an HTML paragraph structure).  Standard transcription only offers SRT format.
  • Unlimited transcription time: Standard transcription isn’t very easy to get in real time as most providers offer you limited audio length. For example, Google offers five-minute time chunks of transcription, which means you have to start a new five-minute section just before the previous one ends to preserve the flow. With intelligent transcription there’s no limit to the length of time available.
  • Optimization: The biggest challenge is how to optimize your use of transcriptions. With standard transcription, you get the text script and this creates oodles of data with exciting potential. With intelligent transcription you realize this potential with insights, action items, questions, topics, and trackers.

Who’s using intelligent transcription?

Intelligent transcription has a wide range of use cases across different industries. Here are some examples:

  • Many start-ups in the productivity space use intelligent transcription to give them an edge over competitors and to save time (which can make up for lack of funds or resources). By using highly accurate transcription in meetings you can create newsletters, or content from the information. As sales growth is very important for a start-up, intelligent transcription facilitates swift market research.
  • Customers use intelligent transcription during live events and webinar platforms, as well as insights, so they can post their event and summarize using a real-time API.
  • Start-ups working with asynchronous communications like voice notes for workplace collaboration benefit from intelligent transcription as they can segregate data by topics.
  • Intelligent transcription is popular for voice-based social networks and podcast providers because it increases content accessibility by catering for format preference, and also increases audience potential by catering for disabilities. It also helps with SEO, searchability, link building and publicity.
  • Contact centers and sales domains use intelligent transcription to track and coach agents by identifying what phrases work best with customers and drive better results.

4 ways developers benefit from using Symbl.ai’s intelligent transcription – “Transcription Plus”

Symbl.ai’s Transcription Plus offers you intelligent transcription services with all of the features and benefits discussed above: higher accuracy, unlimited transcription time, sync and async, multiple output formats, speaker separation, and optimization. Making it easier for you to use and provides real value to business.

Symbl.ai’s Transcription Plus provides you with the ideal solution because:

  1. It’s easier for you to integrate with Symbl.ai’s plug-and-play APIs. You can be up and running within minutes. Transcription Plus works with a wide range of different audio channels, such as web RTC, telephony, and recorded files – streaming through Websocket and using the Async API post live audio.
  2. Most transcription suppliers (such as AWS, Google, and Azure) offer different APIs for punctuation, diarization, topic or keyword detection, etc. This increases the complexity of the system and the pricing. Symbl.ai offers all conversation insights and intelligent transcription through one API: Transcription Plus.
  3. Transcription Plus reduces a lot of your engineering requirements. As well as working with multiple audio channels, Transcription Plus also supports JSON, text, SRT, and MD output formats.
  4. You’ll enjoy straightforward post-processing of your transcriptions. For example, you can use Transcription Plus’ speaker separation to have clear and accurate differentiation within conversations and Q&As.

Transcription Plus makes it faster and easier to integrate your voice or video products, making conversations more searchable, accessible, and valuable than ever. Contact Symbl.ai to start transcribing today.

Additional reading:

Rajath DM