Transcription: Fun Facts and Its Critical Role for Your Business

Transcription has become an essential service in today’s competitive business environment.

Companies that are looking to improve their content marketing or reach newer audiences are leveraging transcription.

Working with a Transcription services company can help you to save time and get accurate transcripts of your audio and video content.

If you are not transcribing your content yet, you are missing obvious opportunities for marketing your business and improving efficiency. 

Fun Transcription Facts :

Before we get into why transcription is important, let’s start with some fun facts you probably don’t know.

• Transcription goes way back in ancient Egypt. During the height of the Pharaohs, transcriptionists were important figures of the courts and were known as scribes. The scribes were exempted from physical labor and taxation.
• The word “Transcription” was first used in the modern world in 1598 by Joh Florio as an entry in his Italian/English dictionary.
• A transcriptionist is a person who captures spoken words in audio or video files in the form of text. A machine that does the same thing is known as a transcriber!
• In 1910, 81% of the typing workforce comprised women. The main reason for this was that the typewriters were designed and marketed like sewing machines.
• In 1998, typing 40 words per minute was considered fast. Today, typing 40 words per minute is considered average. 
• The average person speaks 150 to 170 words per minute, which is about four times the average number of words that we can type. This is why it takes at least 5 hours to transcribe a 1-hour file.

Surprised by the facts about transcription? Let’s find out why you need transcription for your business.

Read Also: Transcribe Sermons/Speech for Wider Audience

What is Transcription and Why is it Important?

Transcription is capturing speech content, from audio or video files, into text. The content to be transcribed can be an interview, sermon, lecture, meeting, training, and so on.

Transcription makes it easy for your audience to consume your content and find the information that they need fast. 

For example, training transcripts can be formatted with subheadings and bullets to make it easy to identify core information.

For attorneys, transcripts can be printed and important information is highlighted with a pen.

Using Transcription for Business

Transcription makes it easy to pass information to your audience for various end results. 

For example, for companies engaged in online marketing, videos, and audio files can be transcribed and repurposed as blog posts, reports, or email newsletters for lead generation.

Transcription can also improve your website’s search engine optimization to generate targeted visitors.

For example, you can embed videos on your website and transcribe them to enable search engine spiders to know what the information is about.

Depending on your industry, your audience may not be as comfortable with watching videos as they are with reading text documents.

Videos can take a lot of internet data bandwidth, which can be expensive for audiences using mobile devices to access them.

For these customers, downloading a PDF transcript of the video would make more sense.

Choosing a Transcription Company

Now that you know the importance of transcription services, you need the right partner who can produce accurate transcripts in a timely manner.

You should do extensive research to find a good transcription company. 

Depending on your industry, you may want to go with specialized transcriptionists (e.g. legal transcriptionists, medical transcriptionists, etc.) or general transcriptionists.

Make sure the company that you choose has a proven track record of producing accurate content for clients in the industry you serve.

Also Read: E-Learning Gallops: Role of Transcription