The real trick is finding the companies that can do a job that’s up to snuff without breaking the bank.

Keeping Transcription Costs Down

Before I get into my recommended companies, let’s cover a few things you can do on your end to keep your transcription costs down.

The better quality your recording is, the easier it will be to transcribe.  Your goal should be to provide clean, crisp recordings with minimal background noise.

One way to do that is to use high quality recording equipment.  For example, if you use a portable voice recorder, then make sure it’s a good one (the Olympus DS-4000 is a favorite among heavy users – it’s just recently been replaced by the DS-5000, though).

If your recordings are going to be made via the phone, you’ll find you get better audio quality using a landline phone than a cell phone.

Also, rates will go up if you have multiple speakers on the recording.  For example, if you’re recording a meeting with 5 participants that all need to be tracked, you’re going to pay a lot more than you would per minute for a phone interview.

Also, if you’re in no particular hurry, you can get far better rates.  One popular services, Casting Words, will do your transcription at rates as low as $.75/minute as long as you’re willing to wait a couple weeks to get your recording.

Best Affordable Transcription Companies

• Casting Words
• Verbal Ink (Formerly Escriptionist)
• GMR Transcription
• AffordableTranscription.net
• InteleANTS

Outsourcing

If you’d rather outsource and know who will be doing your work, you can try out one of these services:

• oDesk
• Rentacoder
• Elance
• Guru

Virtually anything can be transcribed these days including (but not limited to):

• Seminars
• Teleseminars
• Webinars
• Speeches
• Lectures
• Meetings
• Interviews
• Dictations
• Conferences
• Teleconferences
• Podcasts
• Videos
• Focus Groups
• CDs
• DVDs
• Tapes
• LPs

If you’re looking for business transcription services, that’s good news for you because you can get high quality work done quite affordably.

These days most transcriptionist are freelancers or home based workers so it helps keep overhead low resulting in great pricing.

Great For

• Professional Speakers
• Teleconferences
• Meetings
• Legal / Lawyers
• Insurance Companies
• Medical / Doctors
• Court
• Even Writing A Book

What To Look For

If you want a quality job done, here are a few things to look for:

• Audio listened to a 2nd time.
• Transcript is proofread
• Will take time to research names, places, terminology if necessary

Top Business Transcription Companies

• Verbal Ink (Formerly Escriptionist)
• Huseby
• GMR
• Compudex
• Modern Day Scribe
• ADS
• 24 Hour Secretary
• Ubiqus
• Transcription Wing
• SmartDoc

One thing you’ll want to decide on is what kind of transcription you need.  There are three main styles:

Verbatim - In this case, your transcript will come back exactly as heard by the transcriptionist including all the ahs, ums, coughs, and everything else.

Modified Verbatim – This is a popular choice for many as everything is transcribed as heard except that all the ahs, ums, etc are removed.

Professional - Professional level can results in a heavily modified transcript as sentence structure and grammar are all cleaned up.  This can be very useful is you’re doing something like dictating a book.

I remember when I was in high school (many moons ago… in the 90s) one of my friends let me borrow a new program that allowed you to “type” on the computer by “speaking.”

Up until that point, the only time I experienced voice commands was when watching Star Trek or some other sci fi show.

The software is actually still around today – Dragon Naturally Speaking – but back then it was a shell of it’s current self.

Back then, you had to spend a good two hours reading text to the software so it could learn your voice and even then it wasn’t all that accurate.

As it turns out, voices are pretty complex things and it requires a lot of processing power to understand them.

Current limits are still obvious when you use something like Visual Voicemail.  I use it with my Google Voice account, and the only ones it can get 90%+ accuracy with are the voicemails done by a computer.  I can usually get the gist of the message left by regular people, but there are plenty of times where it’s complete gibberish.

Even in 2010, voice recognition still works best in a closed enviromnent.  For example, if you call customer service for just about any major company now, you’ll be greated by an automated system.

In their system there are a limited number of commands available to you at any given time… frequently yes, no, help, operator, and sometimes numbers 1-10 and letters A-Z.  It’s a whole lot easier for a computer to figure out what you’re saying when you’ve got 50 or so choices vs the entire English language.

Another example is my new smartphone.  I have an Android powered phone and Google being all about “search” has a pretty good “voice search” program running on the phone.  There are still plenty of times where it has no idea what I’m saying, but if you’re careful to speak slowly, clearly, and in an enviromnent with as little background noise as possible, it’s pretty accurate.

Speech To Text – Transcription Software

Speech to text software has been making pretty big strides recently.  Right now software like Dragon Naturally Speaking can do an excellent job with software based transcription if it only has once person’s voice to deal with.

It’s still not up to the task of handling multiple voices so meetings, phone calls, or anything with a lot of background noise is still out.

However, if it has to be 100% accurate you’re still going to need a human to do the transcribing.  There are plenty of online solutions like Casting Words that can do general transcription economically.

Voice Recognition Software Manufacturers:

• Nuance Sofware – Dragon Naturally Speaking
• 3M Voicescript
• Windows Speech Recognition
• MacSpeech Dictate
• e-Speaking
• Eloquently Stated
• Wizzard Software – Interactive Voice Assistant
• ViaVoice

Companies like Google have also been spending millions on voice recognition research.  If you purchase an Android phone, you can see some of their early results by using the voice commands and voice search on the phone.

Right now, most consider Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred and Professional to be the best pieces of software in the voice recognition market.