This is a very topical question especially since the release of the latest iPhone 4S with its built in personal assistant Siri which has firmly thrust voice recognition technology in the face of the masses. The answer has to eventually be yes but in my opinion not for a very long time for all types of audio/video transcription. Already we are seeing single speaker audio move away from a traditional typist and into the domain of Dragon – NaturallySpeaking on Windows, Dictate on Mac. Where Dragon currently falls flat and where traditional outsourced transcription...

Quality is everything … isn’t that how the saying goes? Well, it does if the quality pertains to audio for the purposes of transcription! Too many times we receive audio files for transcription where the quality doesn’t come close to being of excellent quality let alone audible, like it could or should with today’s technology and extensive range of digital voice recorders. Unfortunately, when we advise a client that due to the audio quality, we will only be able to achieve 50% of the dialogue, they ask us to “go ahead”....

When using a transcription service one thing you must check is the security of the file transfer mechanism used by that transcription service. The vast majority of audio we process at The Transcription People is confidential, this means that the audio our clients send to us must be sent to us across the internet securely, this means encrypting the audio from the sender all the way through to our servers. How do we encrypt audio and what should you look for when hiring a transcription service? There are a couple of common ways to transfer files across the...

Olympus have long been the market leaders in both tape and more recently digital voice recorders and dictaphones in Australia and I am sure in most parts of the world. Olympus Voice in Australia is run from their head office in Melbourne with an additional office located in Sydney. In 2009 Olympus Australia have been very agressive with updates to their product range and we have seen a number of recorders discontinued and replaced with newer models. The greatest impact of changes in product line have affected the digital dictaphone range, most commonly used...