

Ask HN: Can someone recommend a good audio transcription service? - eserorg

Can anyone here speak to a positive experience they have had using an online transcription service?<p>I have a large collection of audio conference recordings that I am trying to get transcribed for internal business use.<p>I've tried a variety of voice-recognition software, and they just do not work for the level of fidelity that I am dealing with.<p>Thanks!
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nmcfarl
So my company <http://castingwords.com> provides transcription services (based
on Amazon's Mechanical Turk). We've been doing this for years and have gotten
some excellent reviews for our transcription (not just our technology)
including a nice one from the Wall Street Journal - we've got a quote from
that on the front page.

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cromulent
Andy Baio used Mechanical Turk. Positive experience.

[http://waxy.org/2008/09/audio_transcription_with_mechanical_...](http://waxy.org/2008/09/audio_transcription_with_mechanical_turk/)

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eserorg
Sweet!

I'm hacking together a perl script right now using the Mechanical Turk API.

It's automatically spliting up the mp3 files, generating the html forms, and
loading them into MTurk.

I'm going to use a 2x coverage for each chunk and see what happens.

This is a brilliant idea. Thank you for the suggestion! I can't believe it
didn't occur to me before -- and we are _very_ heavy users of AWS.

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braindead_in
We had initially considered using MTurk as the backend for our transcription
service. But found it difficult to tailor to the transcription process we had
in mind.

The system we use now has multiple stages. We split up the files into smaller
chunks which are then picked up by our transcribers. Each transcript is then
reviewed, speaker initials and timestamps are added and then they are finally
collated.

We've gotten pretty decent results with our system so far with some very
satisfied customers.

More about our process at <http://callgraph.biz/transcriptionservice#process>

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skmurphy
We have been using the Network Connection transcription services for the last
three years and been very satisfied.
<http://thenetworkconnection.com/transcriptionservices.htm>

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Femur
My girlfriend is a trained court reporter and does freelance transcription on
the side. She charges by the audio-hour. Interested in getting in touch?

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braindead_in
<http://callgraph.biz> \- $0.50 per minute of recorded audio

