The top 6 reasons to consider transcription outsourcing services

It’s becoming more common and a best practice to record and capture everything from internal meetings to training courses to large scale events. Professionals see value in creating records of their discussions to reference later, protect themselves or to support accessibility needs. They’re also taking the opportunity to create transcripts of these recordings for easier search and sharing.

However, these audio and video transcripts are often produced in-house and manually. There’s a real misconception that it’s cheaper, easier and safer to self-transcribe instead of outsourcing transcription efforts. Since it takes the average person between 4-6 hours to transcribe one hour of clear audio (and most audio recorded is not clear of background noise), manual transcription can be a time stealer. New advancements in technology now allow for transcription generation within seconds, making transcription outsourcing an attractive and beneficial time saver.

With transcription integrations available for most popular video hosting and web conferencing platforms, such as Zoom, YouTube, Kaltura, Panopto and others, using transcription technology can and should be seamless. Most partners you’re outsourcing transcription to can leverage these integrations to make a significant difference in how you work. Yet it’s not about outsourcing these efforts to just anyone or finding a quick free transcription tool. You likely don’t want the information and conversations you’re transcribing to get out into the public eye. To avoid data privacy issues but move away from keeping transcription work in-house, outsourcing to a professional transcription partner is your best bet.

Here are the top 6 considerations to take into account if you’re still on the fence about keeping transcription in-house versus opting for outsourced transcription solutions.

1. In-house transcription is manual and formatting is tedious.

If professionals and universities outsource transcription services, they can produce transcriptions in any templates they need quickly and at scale. Outsourcing offers unlimited bandwidth. Many transcription service providers, such as Verbit, offer both automated transcription services and human transcription services to complement them when needed. Human transcribers can edit the technology’s work to achieve 99%+ accuracy for high stakes content.

One enterprise client of Verbit’s which produces video surveys notes that she, “had to spend between 2-5 hours a week managing [transcription efforts]… I had to identify any quality issues myself. With Verbit, that’s gone from 2-5 hours a week to 5 minutes. It’s made a massive difference.” Additionally, if you want your transcript to appear in a special format, it will take effort to produce transcripts and edit each one to meet that special format every time. 

2. Manual transcription takes serious time.

The industry standard for transcription turnaround is 14 days, or 10 business days. Manually transcribing audio or video to text typically takes an average 4 hours for every 1 hour of video or audio for a skilled transcriptionist, and even longer for a person without experience in this process. By opting for fast transcription services through outsourcing, rough drafts of transcripts can be delivered immediately and final transcripts can be accurately produced within 24 hours. Today’s business leaders cannot afford to self transcribe or wait for transcriptions to be turned around by in-house professionals who are not trained in producing them. Offering transcripts to students with a delay in university scenarios also does not make for accessible materials, even if the transcripts themselves are accurate. To provide true equity, leaders and professionals must provide transcripts to those who need them in a timely fashion.

3. In-house transcription makes for an inefficient workflow.

When producing transcripts in house, it often means downloading and uploading transcription files manually into each system being used to host the audio or video. Transcription outsourcing providers often have established relationships with video hosting platforms to remove the upload-download process, which can save professionals significant time and resources. 

For example, Christa Miller, Director of Inclusive Media Design at Virginia Tech, says professionals at the university were producing captions and transcriptions in-house, taking them “6-16 minutes to caption a one-minute video in its previous process.” Verbit is now partnering with Virginia Tech to produce their captions and transcripts seamlessly and populate them automatically in Kaltura. Verbit offers its partners additional integrations with Vimeo, YouTube, Brightcove, Kaltura, Panopto, Zoom, GoToMeeting and many more.

4. Poor audio quality makes in-house transcription challenging.

Poor audio quality may contain too many inaudibles to produce a usable transcript if done in-house by one individual. Professionals should consider outsourcing to partners with expertise in handling files with difficult audio, background noise, accents and different speakers to identify, plus the instances where everyone is talking over each other.

Verbit, for example, has the technology to cancel out factors to reduce background noise and other aspects leading to poor audio quality to ensure transcripts are produced accurately despite these challenges. This level of expertise is particularly crucial in specialized fields where medical transcription outsourcing and legal transcription services are needed and the accuracy of them is paramount. Correctly identifying who said what and exactly how they said it is essential across legal proceedings, HR and corporate conversations, and in many other scenarios.

5. In-house transcription leads to guessing games.

Professionals who do transcription in-house often struggle with the spellings of names and terminology. They must guess at who is speaking, what’s being said and other elements, leading to an array of likely inaccuracies. Additionally, these guessing games cost them a significant amount of time and ultimately slow down what’s already a tedious transcription process.

Outsourcing to technology providers results in more accurate and quicker identification of speakers and terminology. Verbit for example can reach 99%+ accuracy levels. Additionally, professionals can pre-upload terms which serve as hints for the technology to be trained on so that when put to work it can easily identify the terms which are likely to be used in the course, meeting, event or other material being transcribed. This approach combines the benefits of automated transcription services with human input for optimal results.

6. Sensitive information can get into the wrong hands.

Sensitive information that is transcribed is subject to human errors and could easily get into the wrong hands. While NDAs are one fix, enlisting a transcription outsourcing provider with clearly stated compliance and privacy measures is a safer bet. Employee mishaps of sharing information often occur by accident, so it’s often better to avoid the risk of exposing confidential information to human error or rumor mills.

Verbit is compliant with all relevant privacy and information protection standards, such as HIPAA, SOC 2 and GDPR. Compliance is particularly important for healthcare transcription services and other industries like legal dealing with sensitive data.

For these reasons, among others, professionals would be wise to consider transcription outsourcing. For bandwidth issues, expertise, privacy and manual effort, outsourcing tops in-house transcription efforts. Verbit can help to handle these challenges as a reliable transcription outsourcing provider.

Outsourcing transcription services makes for easier workflows

Verbit’s professional transcription services are cost-efficient, highly accurate and meet the specific needs of our customers industries. We offer unique transcription features that can be leveraged by those in the legal, media, education, government and religious spheres.

It shouldn’t be manual, tedious or tricky to generate transcriptions and provide accessible materials to audiences, students and consumers. Outsourcing these efforts means business leaders, legal professionals and others can dedicate their time more wisely. With the right AI transcription technology and a secure platform to keep data safe, professionals can outsource transcription and quickly deliver transcripts to those who can benefit from them. With a trusted transcription outsourcing provider like Verbit, you can focus on your core business while ensuring high-quality, accurate transcripts are delivered efficiently and securely. 

Fast transcription services through a reliable partner

The benefits of outsourcing transcription are many. With Verbit’s transcription you’ll also be privy to additional quality control measures, customization capabilities and a smooth transcription process with integrations designed to give you peace of mind. Let’s partner to have your transcription work completed with the quick turnaround you need. Our custom transcripts will meet your specific needs and keep your information safe. Reach out to our team.