3 Places You See Automated Transcription Software Every Day

3 Places You See Automated Transcription Software Every Day

If you're familiar with machine transcribed audio, you may still be a little fuzzy on its actual uses. You may think of video captions as something only used by film production companies, added hastily in some dark back room as a final step before a release. Maybe your view of transcripts is that they're only ever used for court hearings and always typed up by a professional stenographer.

Audio-based text may seem like an incredibly manual thing to generate just to be used pretty infrequently, but that's just not the case - and while the potential uses of machine transcribed audio may be a mystery to you now, it's guaranteed that you've already encountered one or more without even realizing it.

Here are a few everyday ways you engage with automatic transcriptions, and the software used to generate them, and may not even know:

Passive Television Viewing

If you've ever sat in a nail salon, eaten at a diner, or walked into a convenience store, you may have noticed a television or two somewhere within vicinity of your fellow patrons that's more than likely set to a news channel, or something similar. But with all the existing noise in these spaces there's no way you'd ever be able to hear what's going on, yet I'll bet you've been in similar situations and have been able to follow the current news cycle just fine. That's because these channels often have captions enabled while they're playing. Captions aren't just for the hearing impaired or for those British shows you love but can never actually follow based on audio alone - they also allow you to engage in content in any situation, not just when you're in the comfort of your own living room.

Podcasts

Transcripts are an incredibly useful tool used to both create and consume content within podcasts. Having a transcript allows editors to easily make changes to their current episode or even allows them to create a script for future ones with a few copy/paste maneuvers. On the flip side, there are always listeners who need an accompanying transcript in order to enjoy these episodes. Automatically generating this text content allows the work to be done quickly without much manual effort, and allows creators to spend more time on the quality of their main line of work rather than on typing out a document to support it. It also allows for listeners to engage with episodes in a different way instantly without any additional steps and ensures accessibility for all audiences.

Contacting Customer Service

If you've ever had to make a call to customer service (or basically any department of a larger business for that matter), you've likely been greeted with an automated message before being able to speak with an actual human. This last message you hear, among all the others, is usually something along the lines of your upcoming conversation being recorded for quality and training purposes. But what does this really mean? Is an audio file of your complaint about slow internet stored on some customer service rep's desktop computer from now until the end of time? Well, the answer is... maybe. But often it's more likely that a transcript of your call is kept instead of the actual call itself. This is an optimal choice on the business' end for a lot of reasons, but the main one is storage. You can keep much more text-based information in a digital drive than you would be able to with audio material, so going with transcripts over mp3 files is often the more economical route.

There are so many ways that automated transcription creeps into our lives every single day, but the best way to experience this tool is by using it yourself.

Get started today by visiting Vocalmatic!