Professional transcription service: Using automatic speech recognition in a successful manner

Recording, editing, publishing online - creating media content has never been so easy. Alongside media production, audio and video content is playing an increasingly important role in business communication. However, these new possibilities also confront companies with new challenges. Often, they need to obtain a quick overview of what has been said to enable them to make the correct decisions.

KERN offers a professional transcription service to create written records of German or foreign language audio or video material. During this process, spoken word texts and discussions are written down from audio or video recordings. The variety of texts which need to be recorded in writing ranges from video conferences, telephone interviews as a data collection strategy and interviews for films and television productions to series of lectures. To transcribe these, there is now machine transcription, which makes this process considerably easier.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR): Machine transcription

With the machine transcription from KERN, we can create a raw transcript in just a few clicks. The subsequent human editing process allows us to create an even more exact result.

What are the prerequisites for automatic transcription?

ASR creates especially good results when the audio quality of the recording is good, when there are not too many interfering background noises and when the persons speaking do not have a strong accent. As such, the transcription of professionally produced media is generally more successful that the transcription of a piece recorded with a mobile phone where the speaker is talking in a foreign language.

When is human editing needed?

For transcripts that need to be translated and which may be used for things such as subtitling, human editing is recommended. Alongside the required foreign language, the subtitles must include the time code so that they appear at the right moment. The length of the text is of critical importance here and the highest level of precision is required during translation. The translators and transcription specialists of KERN are trained for this and have many years of experience in the area of subtitling. The KERN team would be pleased to advise any interested parties as to whether machine transcription is an option for your project.