The Power of Spoken Word

Hello world! This is Alexei, writing my first blog post as a TranscribeMe founder, and I wanted to take a step back and deliberate a little on why we are doing transcription, and why it is so important that voice can be converted to text.

What is the power of voice?  When we talk to one another, we use many ways to communicate meaning. We look for cues in facial expressions, body language, and most importantly, in our voice. As well as information, we convey emotions and feelings through spoken language, and this additional layer gives a new dimension to our meaning. We use voice to perceive reality and express ourselves to communicate efficiently, accurately and expressively. The best moments of using our voice come when we feel understood.

“The moment we speak is an emotional moment that reflects who we are and what we think, and the moment our spoken word is converted into text, it is memorialized”

                               —Christina Domecq, Spinvox Founder, Presentation at Davos

Although the spoken word is powerful, there are inherent problems. Chief amongst them is that we don’t have time to listen to everything. A natural solution to balancing a busy schedule is to move towards written communication, like email, text, and social network banter. The simple truth is that we can all read much faster than we can listen, and we can absorb more information through written copy. Otherwise, we have to stop everything we are doing to focus on listening, and often find it frustrating to search through voice recordings to find and bring out the golden nuggets of meaning.

When I was studying computer science at Auckland University out at about 10 years ago, automated voice recognition was always an exciting “future technology”. For some things, like short messages, voicemails and commands, it is now reality. Excellent software like Siri and Yap has been developed and refined over the years to provide a service that looks like “magic” to users around the world.

However for complex voice, like interview and meeting recordings, or long dictation, it’s not there yet. Computer algorithms, as smart as they are, can not yet capture emotion in our voice. They can’t understand the logic flow of a conversation and intelligently transcribe it, and neither can our machines deliver a high quality of output. Real people are still needed to do the job of transcription, and they do it well.

There is a megatrend of analog information moving into the digital world. Communication, books and videos are all being uploaded to the Internet. And so is voice, on an even larger scale. This is a growing wave of content ready to be digitized and memorialized, and a growing demand to retain information in a useful, searchable format that can drive collaboration.

We are here to provide a service to convert voice to text, with the help of expert crowd transcribers. We split complex transcription jobs into micro-tasks, which are then transcribed by real people all around the world. Our machine algorithms and transcription tools give our experts the simplest tools yet, so they can be most efficient and create the highest quality transcription.

We are moving just a little closer to a place where our most important conversations can be retained, searched and shared. With TranscribeMe voice to text services, we can capture the power of the spoken word with 98% quality, in a ridiculously fast turnaround time.  We hope you find our service useful, and I look forward to sharing more of our journey on this blog with you.

– Alexei