When recording material for transcription

• Check the recorder each time to ensure that it is working properly.
• Replace batteries periodically. Weak batteries cause fluctuation in recording speed and volume.
• Record at the recorder’s highest volume.
• Spell our participants’ and company names when applicable.
• During interviews or conferences, balance microphones between speakers or directly in front of each participant so all voices are heard by the transcriptionist.When recording on micro cassettes, record on the 2.5 speed for best quality.
• By not rewinding tapes once you have finished recording, we know at a glance how long each tape is, allowing us to schedule your work promptly and keep production moving.
• Tell us what the outcome of your project is so we won’t spend time and money transcribing any information that is not required.
  

Source : http://www.andersontypefast.com/

Using Amazon Mechanical Turk for transcriptions: Effective, but it's a kluge

Andy Baio has an interesting review of Amazon's Mechanical Turk being used for "cheap, easy" audio transcription. The review immediately caught my eye -- I've been manually transcribing interviews for years, and, as Baio notes, it's a royal pain. Human transcription services are one alternative, but they tend to be expensive and a hassle to arrange. I've been waiting for some company to launch a cheap, automated, accurate transcription service or software package. Could Mechanical Turk be the answer?

After reading the review, I've come to the conclusion that it's not. The service is cheap, but it is definitely not automated -- remember, this is Mechanical Turk, which is a marketplace for buyers and sellers of services that need to be done by human beings. I did not try to transcribe anything through Mechanical Turk, but Baio's 1,143-word review describes a multistage, manual process that involves:

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Transcription job: Home, sweet, home

Editor's note: This is one in a weekly series of profiles on locally owned and operated businesses in Southern Oregon.

What do you do and how long have you been doing it? I do radiology transcription for major hospitals on the East Coast. I've been doing this 16 years.

How long have you lived in the Rogue Valley? We moved here in 2001 from Stillwater, N.J.

What inspired you to go into this line of work? I retired from the corporate world because it was getting too rat-crazy and I wanted to be home with my 7-year-old son. So I went back to school to get the certification I needed. I wanted a good income and to be home with my son when he was younger.

What decision or action would you change if you could do it again? I probably should have begun doing this sooner rather than later. The more experience you have, the more money you make. I'm starting to make good money now and if I had started at a younger age, I'd be making more now.

What's the toughest business decision you've made? Deciding on what's a good account and client and what's not, and staying away from companies that outsource work outside the U.S. I'm an independent contractor and sub-contract for people all over the United States. My interest is finding companies that hire only people in the U.S.

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MessageSling Makes Mobile Voice-Text Transcription a Two-Way Street

When you're at your desk, you have many ways to access and reply to voice-mail messages. You can use your desk phone with its ergonomically engineered keys or, increasingly, your PC with its speaker or headphone, keyboard and mouse. The process is a lot less convenient for mobile phone users. Limitations in both handsets and the circumstances where they can be used present major obstacles. Worcester, Mass.-based startup messageSling plans to use speech-to-text technology to help overcome some of those obstacles.

Launched in January 2008, messageSling made a splash at this month's DEMOfall 08 show. The foundation of its offering is a fairly conventional stand-alone voice-mail service. Users instruct their cellular carriers to forward unanswered calls to a messageSling number. They can then access their messages in the traditional way by dialing in and navigating a key-press menu. Users can also listen to their messaes as MP3 audio files, either as delivered in email messages or on the messageSling Web site.

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