What Are The Best Features To Look For In Human Transcription Services?
No matter what your profession or sector is, using every tool available is crucial. Transcriptions provide numerous benefits that can support you in your project or content goals. However, doing them yourself is tedious and time-consuming. The best course of action is to hire human transcription services.
The question is: which service should you choose? With hundreds of companies to choose from, how do you know which is the best transcription service to go with?
What Should You Look For In A Human Transcription Service?
Regardless of how many features a human transcription service has, there are key elements that make a service ideal. The most important factor is that you can rely on the service in any scenario, no matter what your industry or niche is.
In particular, here’s what you should look for in a human transcription service:
- Versatility - A human transcription service is reliable if it’s well-versed in a variety of industries and niches. Their experience with multiple sectors should give you peace of mind that their transcripts are top-notch, regardless of which sector you belong to
- Flexibility - The ideal transcription service can create transcripts based on your specifications. Besides speaker labeling and timestamps, you should be able to provide custom templates that transcribers will use to create transcripts
- Agility - If you need transcripts in a pinch, your transcription provider of choice should match your urgent needs. Services like TranscriptionWing, for example, offer rush turnaround where you can receive your transcript in 4 hours
- Convenience - Transcription providers should provide a smooth, intuitive experience as you order your transcripts. Features like drag-and-drop upload and project management should be a must in a transcription service
Feature Rundown Of The Top Human Transcription Services
Human transcription services have evolved to the point where they go above and beyond in areas related to transcription. The best services offer features that significantly improve the quality of life for customers by addressing some of their project woes, like workflow bottlenecks and accessibility.
Of course, you should aim only for the human transcription service that offers the richest feature set. This way, you’ll have little to think or worry about in other areas of your workflow.
To help you choose, here’s a brief rundown of the top features of the best human transcription services:
- TranscriptionWing
- Rev
- GoTranscript
- TranscribeMe
- GMR Transcription
Features | TranscriptionWing | Rev | GoTranscript | TranscribeMe | GMR Transcription |
Drag and drop upload | ✔ | ✔ | |||
Flexible turnaround options | ✔ | ✔ | |||
Meeting minutes | ✔ | ✔ | |||
Video captioning | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
Translation services | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |
Automated transcription | ✔ | ✔ | |||
Machine transcript editing | ✔ | ||||
Multiple file format support | ✔ | ✔ | |||
Customizable template | ✔ | ✔ | |||
Security and confidentiality | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Questions To Help You Choose The Best Transcription Service
Your decision may not be driven by just a look at the spec sheet alone. There are several factors that you should consider in your choice. The most important factor is how well a human transcription service suits your needs.
To help you better recognize the best service for you, here are some guide questions you should answer:
What is your industry or niche?
Every industry has its own unique needs and uses for transcripts. Healthcare professionals, for example, must ensure patient privacy to comply with HIPAA. They need transcripts that maintain the personally identifiable information (PII) of patients.
Thus, you need to look for a transcription service that specializes in your specific sector. It’s not enough that a provider is skilled in transcription — they must be highly capable of transcription in specific industries.
What are your content or project goals?
Accessibility, shareability, and search engine optimization (SEO) are among the top factors that professionals and content creators try to achieve.
Transcripts help significantly in those areas. However, the ideal transcription provider will go one step beyond and offer services like captioning and translation to further support any content or project goal.
What is the audio quality of your video or sound files?
Transcription challenges like muddled audio quality, crosstalk, and background noise can make it difficult to transcribe an audio file. The best transcription providers should be able to manage these challenges and provide an accurate, reliable transcript.
However, when the audio is unintelligible beyond comprehension, the provider must still be able to keep up. TranscriptionWing, for example, has a feature called ListenLink™, which provides hyperlinks that navigate the user immediately to unintelligible portions in the audio.
Save Time - Choose The Best Human Transcription Service Now
There are many human transcription services available online. You can spend time and energy trying them all out until you find the best one that fits you. Alternatively, you can choose TranscriptionWing, which offers all the features you need (and more) and help you with your project goals.