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 services still add great value is in multi speaker audio and video like meetings, interviews, focus groups, podcasts etc.

Our sister company Dictate Australia recently wrote an extensive blog post on using Dragon for multi speaker audio and the transcription options open to you if you don’t use Dragon to help you, titled Can Dragon NaturallySpeaking Transcribe Meetings or Interviews?

Like every business transcription services have to adapt with the times. At The Transcription People we are doing just that. Having recognised years ago that Dragon was going to be substantial in the digital voice world we set the team at our partner company Dictate Australia the task of knowing Dragon, for Mac and Windows, inside out, to allow us to not only provide that software to our clients should they decide to go the voice recognition route but also to act as consultants allowing us to advise on all aspects of speech recognition technology.

There is still a major role that transcription services can provide in the speech recognition space by acting as a conduit for busy users to process their digital audio recordings into Dragon for them. With Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional edition clients only need to spend an initial five minutes training their voice profile. Once done they can then pass that profile to us. All the client then needs to do is record their digital dictation and send that to us for processing. Our proofreading team then step in and provide a voice recognition service which not only passes the audio through Dragon NaturallySpeaking using the clients own voice profile but they add further value by proofreading the completed document within Dragon thereby updating the user profile and improving accuracy after each transcription.

The client therefore has a hassle free transcription solution using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, all they need to worry about is recording the audio – we take care of the rest. This is a much cheaper solution than traditional transcription as the voice to text is handled by Dragon, the value add comes with the proof reading and profile training.

Most people think of outsourcing for menial, repetitive or procedure-driven tasks. For a growing SMB this can also apply to more hands on roles too, one example of this for my business is Human Resources. Employing a couple of onsite full time staff and managing a large number of onsite and offsite contractors, HR is an essential part of my business but one that I detest and am not experienced in. However, it does not quite justify a single full time role and as Director I do not have the time or skills to manage all aspects of HR for my business.

This is where Kristy and her team at Footprint Recruitment come in. Kristy and I would often bump into each other at various business functions and would banter with each other on twitter (Kristy is @FootprintCC on twitter ), a recurring whinge I would often have is the amount of time and effort HR was costing me and my business.

Footprint have come up with a small business HR package to help small  business with their HR. We have been trialling this with Kristy and I have to say it is money well spent. This is how it works, we pay Footprint a weekly fee and for that they will handle any HR tasks and answer any HR questions we have. Some of the things we have hurled at Footprint are:

• Create the wording and place ads for us on SEEK;
• Vetting of job applicants;
• Staff questionaire to gauge job satisfaction with report and analysis of the results;
• HR procedure documents tailored for my business;
• And a myriad of HR related questions.

As your business grows HR becomes a necessary and one of the important gears driving your business engine. If you are like me, needing to run your business and not needing to learn a new job role, I would encourage you to have a chat with Footprint to see how they can help you with your business HR needs. For me, they’ve been a Godsend!

I have just come off the phone from yet another frustrating phone call with the Australian Taxation Office. I can get over the fact that I have to wait an excessive amount of time every time I call, but what I can’t get over is the lack of respect and understanding shown to Australian small businesses by the random ATO phone operator I speak to every time about my business.

Like most small businesses times are tough. For me in particular my business has been greatly affected over the last 12 months by a whole range of factors which have restricted my cashflow. Many of our clients are Queensland based, when the floods hit this caused a large dent in some of our regular work from there, not to mention the open invoices they have struggled to pay (and no, I don’t dare hassle them for it either). We have had clients not pay very large invoices resulting in an extremely costly – in time and money – court case which we won. But although the original invoice was covered, only a small percentage of the exhorbitant legal fees were rewarded to us. And to top it all off we had the unfortunate pleasure of meeting face-to-face with an assuming “business” con man who also managed to rip us off in the sum of thousands of dollars. Add to that global economic uncertainty, yo-yo’ing interest rates and a general trend in the corporate world to reduce costs thus affecting local outsourced services, then anyone still in business and keeping their head above water should be rightly proud.

They should also have the support of the Australian Government and in particular the people we all love to hate, the Australian Taxation Office. Regardless of all the woes my business and yours may be suffering, we still manage to employ Australian’s, pay them regularly, keep work in Australia and add our sizeable chunk to the economy. Threats of shutting down a business which has been operating for over ten years are unneccesary and just add to the stress most business owners are under.

GST; we all either love it or hate it but we all face facts and deal with it as a part of our every day business life. In my business I keep a GST account to store the governments money until they come calling every quarter to take it back. Occassionally due to unforeseen circumstances I have to dip into this account to keep staff and debtors happy, I am sure this sounds familiar with many of you. This incurs a shortfall with the ATO and arrangements are then entered into. The golden rule is never stop talking to the ATO, keep them informed of your situation and more importantly pay them regulalry, even if it is just a small amount, keep passing them cash to show you are a good citizen and good business owner. There is no getting away from tax debt but there does need to be leniency from the ATO, especially for small business.

If I had one suggestion for the faceless men and women of the tax department it would be to form a team specialising in small/medium business tax assistance. Let us, after holding for at least an hour, talk to someone who is familiar with each of our own individual business history. Yes I can imagine the logistics of this as being “quite hard” but unlucky, life and business is hard, we deal with it, so can you. Get some compassion ATO and support small business, we are generating wealth for the country too!

Not happy Jan, can you tell?

My company as you will likely know offers transcription services, that is we take digitally recorded audio of people speaking (e.g. meetings, interviews, focus groups, company announcements, the list goes on) and we convert that to written text.

Sounds easy right? To do this we employ a team split in two, we have the transcription typists, the people who actually listen and type and the proofreaders, the people who QA the completed document.

In this post I am going to focus on the role of a transcription proofreader to give you an idea of what exactly they do and why we have them.

A transcription proofreader is a little different to the proofreader that most are familiar with. The more common role of a proofreader typically receives a transcript, usually from a book publisher or editorial team and reads the script checking for grammar, punctuation and sometimes flow of the text. In the print world, online or paper, this is an essential role. For a transcription company the proofreader works a little differently. Rather than just reading text of a completed transcript they actually listen to the original audio, the same audio the typist listened to as they typed. Their task is to fill in any words that the typist could not hear or understand as well as ensuring that the document reads well and true. The proofreader will also format the document, ie. use a specific font, add any specific headers, add or remove page numbering based on each clients requirements. To summarise the transcription proofreader:

• Quality checks all transcripts
• Formats documents as per each clients requirements
• Fills in any blanks missed by the transcription typist
• Ensures all documents are grammatically correct

The proofreader is a key role in any transcription business, we call this the second set of eyes and helps ensure that any transcript is as accurate as can be based on the audio. After all, it has passed through two sets of ears and eyes before any document is returned to a client.

Do most transcription services utilise a proofreader? The answer to that is unfortunately, no. Proofreaders add to the overall transcription time and obviously increase costs. We believe that quality is paramount and is what sets my business apart.

Perception is such a powerful thing, we are all perceived differently as people by our peers, family and friends – the same applies to your business and more importantly your website. Your website is often prospective customers first insight into your business so what they read initially determines how they perceive you. Make big claims, look important and generally people will believe what they read. But dig a little deeper and often you can uncover some truths that can knock a business down a peg or two.

Like most in business we strive to maintain our top ranking in Google for our main business keywords, other than client referrals leads from Google are our biggest source of clients. We also use these rankings to see who Google thinks are our main competitors and we often skim through their websites to see what they are upto, who doesn’t. One such competitor came under particular scrutiny from us this month thanks to some spamming of some of our key clients and covert (pretending to be from a ficticious business yet having their real business name in their voicemail – oops) calls to our office to find out our transcription rates.

This is where perception came in. At first glance some of the content we read made us think this was a huge company, they have a Board of Directors that meet monthly, they have been around for decades, their staff have fancy titles like “Business Development Representative” but when you look a little closer are these really such amazing things? Perception was yes, reality was no.

Lets start with having a Board of Directors. Well we have one of those and we meet daily, we just don’t state that on our website. Amazing what a few photos of people in business attire sitting posed will do, yes looks impressive but when we followed a link to one of the Directors website, it was very poor and did not give a good perception other than they were just there to look good and add “perceived credibility”.

Claims of being around for decades, maybe a business has evolved since the beginning of time but is it really the same business that was started all those years ago? In this particular example the government had started transcription way way back, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that, as was the trend, time to let this activity go to private business which is when this company was really formed – oh same time as us !

How about Business Development Representative as a title. If you were a Uni student and given some work, cold calling, how would you feel about that title, quite chuffed I reckon.

But what annoys me most is disclosure or lack of it. Be honest about who you employ and where your work is going. We openly state that we use Australian and New Zealand typists, that is my policy and although sometimes it is hard to stick to for a number of reasons we do stick to it. Sure we could outsource our work to India or the Philippines for a fraction of the cost we pay our local typists, but we don’t. I am sure the typing in these countries is great, but my companies policy is to have Australian audio transcribed in Australia.

My emotions about these incidents this week have swayed during the week from anger, to fear, to amazement and finishing with pride and confidence. Proud that my business is being looked at by my competitors, proud that we conduct ourselves ethically and confident that we continue to provide a professional service.

My business branding says it all, we are THE Transcription People, the people you go to for transcription in Australia, the transcription experts in fact. But the more I networked last year, the more I realised how many people just did not know what transcription was. All too often I was met with a glazed look and “Oh transcription” short pause “…and what is that exactly?”. To be fair most did have an inkling, something to do with typing, however it is much more than that as I have explained in an earlier blog post – What Is Transcription?

Just to make things a bit more interesting I decided to spring the What Is Transcription question on some of my close social network friends and family and here is what they said …

Featured in the video, in order of appearance:

• Janna Fikh from Fletcher Tax – @FletcherTax
• Paris Searson from Fleishman Hillard – @ParisInSydney
• Angela Vithoulkas from Vivo Cafe, Sydney – @AngelaVIVO
• Iggy Pintado author of The Connection Generation – @IggyPintado

Like any business, 2010 presented The Transcription People with its fair share of ups and downs, and there were times where closing down the business and packing shelves at Woolies was quite an appealing idea, fortunately though, the ups outweighed the downs which is why we run our own businesses right?

2010 followed a similar pattern to previous years for The Transcription People, steady business growth and the continuation of lessons learned from a plethora of life and business experiences thrown my way, some of them very hard lessons, some of them on a personal level and some were just poor judgement on my part. We saw one of our larger government clients leave us, opting for price over quality after three years of service and another client dropping us (again after three years of service) with an attempt to bully us into letting them off a large invoice – perhaps it’s a three year business itch?  Those of you who know me will know that 1) I will not be bullied by a business of any size and 2) I have principles and I stick to them – I work damn hard to continue to build a professional transcription service and I will fight to keep my reputation and if all else fails – invest in a great debt collection service!

Like many businesses staffing continued to be a challenge for us. We have a great team of transcriptionists both onsite and work from home (online) across Australia. Our workload continued to remain steady throughout the year and we managed to allocate audio files, have them transcribed and proofread and returned to the client on time, every time. This highlighted to me how important processes are within the business which in 2010 we set about implementing and improving these.

On the positive side we saw 60 plus new clients utilise our services; we created an employment opportunity for a school leaver with a disability to complete a one year traineeship, Rhianne, my ever faithful and loyal PA graduated to her second year traineeship; was nominated and won Trainee of the Year for Business Services for our region. I also had to confront my fears with some speaking gigs at various business functions. Throughout the year I was invited to speak – mainly about social media and its uses within business – at several events in Sydney and Newcastle. These included The Australian Businesswomen’s Network, Digicitz, A-List Entrepreneurs and AICD Newcastle. I won’t lie to you, I was pretty nervous before each event but during and after was quite a buzz. I was buoyed by many of the positive comments I received at the events and after via twitter and Facebook. Public speaking is something I do quite enjoy (once it’s over) and one of my goals in 2011 is to do more. I’ve been told that I could talk for Australia if talking ever becomes an Olympic sport, so I really enjoy talking about what I do and enjoy – business and social media.

Time to move on with 2011 – onwards and upwards!

Carol Duncan, Gordon Whitehead & Annalisa Holmes

So how did I end up in a room full of 60-odd suits, sharing the stage with Gordon Whitehead and Carol Duncan? Two words – Iggy Pintado.

Thanks to Mr Pintado I was the third speaker in the line up at the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) Hunter Briefing on The Board & Social Media. The event was organised to look at trends in social media and how online connections can benefit directors, boards and businesses.

This group was the perfect audience for The Transcription People, so once I realised they were interested in hearing Gordon, Carol and I speak, I decided it would be fun.

First up was Gordon (@The_Git), from Sticky Advertising, who talked about what social media is, how to get online and developing a social media policy for an organisation. Radio presenter Carol Duncan (@carolduncan) shared some practical skills with the directors, telling them about online networking, promoting their businesses online and opportunities available through online connections.

And then there was me. I talked about how to actually use social media to build those connections and promote business, giving examples of what I do, like share the amount of transcription we’ve done every week, talk about our successes and making new friends and contacts. Social media has given me another outlet to promote TTP, has led to new clients and cemented my standing in social media circles.

I know it’s been more small business operators who have embraced over larger organisations social media to date, but this event really showed the AICD members the opportunities available to them. Social media is a tool for all business.

After chatting to Gordon and Carol online it was good to actually meet them and join them in explaining how social media can be incorporated into business promotion.

So thank you for putting me forward for this event Iggy, it was fun!

Do you know the second verse to Advance Australia Fair, the Australian national anthem?

If the answer is “no”, you’re not alone – as I found out recently when speaking at the A List Entrepreneurs October event at Vivo Café in George St, Sydney. This group is a network of clever business people who meet once a month to share war stories, have a few drinks and listen to some great speakers. I was flattered to be included in the line up.

Let me backtrack a bit here to fill you in. I won the opportunity to speak about The Transcription People when my name was drawn out at September event. Not certain I wanted to speak in front of so many business types, I knew I had to come up with something that would entertain them.

So I thought I’d get them all to sing the national anthem. I secretly suspected many would have no idea there even was a second verse, let alone know the words, so I was very nice and had the words printed on a card, with an explanation of what The Transcription People (TTP) do on the back. The point was to show that TTP could take audio of one – or many – voices, transcribe it and have it back to the client quickly.

Just getting the cards printed provided a few hiccups because they came back to me with a white line straight down the middle of the card (how did that get there?), but we had no time to change it, so David and I headed down the F3 ready for the A List sing-a-long.

After hearing how Vivo Café owner, the smart and savvy Angela Vithoulkas, went into business with her brother Con, I was up. I was feeling nervous but strode on stage ready to lead the motley choir in front of me. Then Angela sabotaged the music (on purpose I suspect) and everything got a bit messy for a while, but we pulled it all back on track to finish on a high.

My bit over, I relaxed with some wine and enjoyed networking. I was thrilled to hitch a ride on Tony Hollingsworth’s Harley Davidson (photos captured by the lovely Nancy Georges) to one of my favourite Darlinghurst haunts, Bill & Tony’s, when A List finished. Here David and I shared dinner with some of the Centurions.

Who would have thought such a comedy of errors would end this way? What a night!

And just in case you’re wondering, here are all the words to Advance Australia Fair (please stand):

Australians all let us rejoice,
For we are young and free;
We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil;
Our home is girt by sea;
Our land abounds in nature’s gifts
Of beauty rich and rare;
In history’s page, let every stage
Advance Australia Fair.

In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance Australia Fair.

Beneath our radiant Southern Cross
We’ll toil with hearts and hands;
To make this Commonwealth of ours
Renowned of all the lands;
For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia Fair.

In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance Australia Fair.

A few weeks ago I was honoured to be a presenter on the ABN webinar Increase Your Visibility as someone who has used social media to build business success.

I was a bit surprised when Suzi asked me to talk about my online experiences in the webinar, but who am I to say no to an opportunity to talk about my business, Facebook and Twitter? So I jumped in and shared my experiences. After the webinar finished I started thinking about how far I’ve come as an ABN member since joining more than three years ago.

When I first became an ABN member I wasn’t really sure what I needed. I knew I could do with some help building my name and assistance with business advice, as I was still running The Transcription People from home and wanted to expand, but would the ABN be able to provide that? Yes – and more, I found out once I actually got involved!

I was an inactive member for a year before a call from member liaison Stella DeZotti encouraged me to join the ABN’s MentorNet program. Taking part in the program was a huge step for me, but well worth it. I had regular, structured online sessions with my mentor and our the ABN members assigned to our pod and this gave me the confidence to put myself out there and start to attend more face-to-face events, something I used to avoid (hard to imagine, I know).

The business was at a crossroads, as it was based in our home, and I had to take the leap and expand or be happy to stay as it was. My mentor and the support of my MentorNet pod, helped me make that decision to move the business to a commercial office and I haven’t looked back since.

Since being involved in the ABN’s MentorNet program I’ve been asked to speak at ABN events and last week’s webinar and my business has been a case study on the ABN site. I have also been invited to speak at other events such as Digital Citizens and A-List Entrepreneurs and upcoming Australian Institute of Company Directors in Newcastle.

For me the ABN has been far more than a networking opportunity. Being an ABN member has introduced me to a community of inspiring and professional businesswomen who go out of their way to support each other.

And I’ve had opportunities to grow my business that I hadn’t considered when I first started working from home.

My experience with ABN continues to be enriching every successive year and I highly recommend it for new and growing businesses.