

Ask HN: Review my startup - Audio Transcription Outsourcing - braindead_in

A bit of backstory. I am a single founder in Bangalore, India and have been working on this since the past 2 years. I wrote the CallGraph Skype Recorder and was offering a bunch of services around it, and the transcription service picked up. I wanted to outsource the transcription to a 3rd party but didn't find any good ones. So I went ahead and built one.<p>We have done more than 1500 hours of transcription to date and have around 800 certified transcribers. We have some very satisfied customers and few of them are as old as 2 years.<p>I am looking to scale it up now and doing some marketing. Your feedback is much appreciated.<p>Over the past few years I've seen so many great discussions on HN and have learnt so many things from it. I can't thank HN enough for it. You guys are the best!
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staunch
There's definitely a need for this. Some ideas if you want to make it so
people can integrate it into apps:

1) Turn around time should be faster (hours).

2) Pricing matters _a lot_. Get the price down as low as you can. Go for
volume.

3) Offer a simple API for adding audio and retrieving the text.

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braindead_in
Thanks!

We want to get to an turnaround of hours, but we'll have to scale up for that.

Pricing is rock bottom compared to competing services. The industry standard
is around $2 per minute.

API is in the works. :)

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tarkeshwar
This business should do well. Few feedback on the site:

1\. Link logo to home.

2\. Reduce number of fonts and sizes on the homepage.

3\. Homepage appears text-heavy.

4\. A demo video may be very useful.

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braindead_in
Thanks. Good feedback.

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roshanonline
many journalists and authors use audio to collect info and interview people.
they routinely need transcription service. Rashmi Bansal of Connect the dots
fame was once looking for such a service. This is a significant market i
guess.

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braindead_in
Yeah, journalists and authors are one of our primary customers. Do you know
which service Rashmi used in the end?

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braindead_in
Clickable link <http://scribie.com>

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phlux
Medical Transcription is a big market and hospitals pay well for the service.

Start looking into this market.

There is a startup that I met on Monday at the RockHealth meetup called
'Beyond Lucid' which is changing the way ambulances select which hospital to
route a patient to, as well as providing electronic forms for the ambulance
encounters to be filled in -- contact them and offer to whitelabel your audio
transcription service as a bolt on to their offering

beyondlucid.com - founder is Christian Witt and their chief eng is David
Saylor (first name dot last name at beyondlucid.com)

There may be legal ramifications for getting into medical transcription which
I am not aware of though (bond insurance etc.) -- should be easy enough to
figure out though.

Talk to the guys at Dr Chrono. I think this was a feature they were asked for
- again, it may be a license/whitelabel opportunity.

edit:

One application which would be amazing would be to have this service coupled
with an app like Phone Tap (getphonetap.com) where I can record a phone call,
then with a click upload and have it transcribed and emailed to me.

This would be great for consumers fighting phone companies, and customer
support/call center applications if you could run it and capture phone audio
somehow...

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braindead_in
Any medical transcription is required to HIPPA compliant, which basically
requires that you have your own facility and protect the data. We can't ever
be able to do that, which kind of rules out the medical transcription market
for us.

White-labeling and partnering with other recording services is a really good
idea and we are pursing it. We are working an API using which you can offer
transcripts and use our service in the backend. That's high on our list of
TODO things.

