This is an expert from this blog post TRANSCRIPTION LANDSCAPE: DO HUMANS EVEN WANT DOMINANCE IN AI-POWERED TRANSCRIPTION SOFTWARE?
The world is full of data. And 90% of the world’s total data was created in the last 2 years.
Let this sink in for a moment: In the past 2 years, we’ve created more data than our human civilization produced since we started writing.
A lot of this data is multimedia files. Whether it is a simple customer call, recording of a meeting, judicial hearing, etc. organizations generate enormous amounts of multimedia files.
Of course, large organizations need to somehow extract value from this stored multimedia content.
THE CHALLENGE OF HUMAN-POWERED MULTIMEDIA TRANSCRIPTION SERVICES
Although it seems more logical for humans to respond to the task of transcribing multimedia files, people can’t adequately respond to the needed level of accuracy and volume. Plus, there’s the security and privacy to think about.
I tend to look at this problem from a construction perspective. Imagine we’re tasked to dig a 1000 miles long ditch, in a perfect, straight line. Will we do it better, faster, easier by getting 1000 people, or go for a mechanized approach? I’m pretty sure that anyone who’s come within 30 feet of a shovel will gladly call on the excavators.
Organizations that regularly do manual transcription of recordings say that it takes up to 9 hours of transcription work to transcribe a single hour of recorded interview. A 9:1 ratio is very hard to use at a scale.
This means that a court hearing of 4 hours will mean one worker’s full workweek to transcribe. Multiply this by many more hours, more hearings, in more courtrooms, every single day, and we soon get to see the problem of human-powered transcription. Human-powered transcription is not scalable.
AI-powered transcription software, on the other hand, has become much easier to use, much faster and much more accurate than traditional transcription platforms. With any of the available software solutions for automated transcription, a single employee can cover a lot of ground, without the grind.
And, one increasingly relevant consideration that makes a huge difference is privacy and security. Automated transcription software where fewer people touch the data are inherently more secure.