That fear has been there for many jobs over the years and a perfect example is the new check out lines in large retail chains that give you the ability to check yourself out.  There is still that required individual that needs to oversee the process and make sure that a human entity can step in when a machine needs our input or worst-case scenario, need’s repair.

In this instance, there are several positive ways to see how the new technology works in our favor and how we are more than just ‘typists.’

Editing

Editing is still and will continue to be a human job.  Virtually there is, even with the best of software, a margin error of at least 5% and that means mistakes.  However, until the artificial intelligence get’s to be fool proof, we (the transcriptionist) are there to make sure that you do get a 100% perfect job.  Removing the ‘uh’s'  and ‘ah’s', typo’s from where, wear and were,  and even punctuation marks that will assist in the inflection of what it is that the speaker is trying to put across.

We as transcriptionist are still needed.

Layout

I have little faith in that most software can completely layout a document in the way we want it by reading our minds.  I know, ye of little faith right?

I can’t even crawl into my client heads and get it accurate 100% of the time, but software has made it extremely easy to make those changes to the documents instead of having to reset a typewriter and retype the entirety of it with the new layout schematics.

Software can assist… I doubt that it will ever replace.

Personal Touches

I can’t tell you how much I get a “Thank you” when a client calls our office and actually reaches a voice of a human being on the other end of the phone.  Far too many times, myself, I get recordings and a ‘push #1 to get…’ on the other end, and it spends 15 minutes trying to get my account number.

Small offices and even some large offices still have that personal touch and I appreciate knowing that when I contact that office I am still treated as a valued client, not as a number.  Software can’t give that type of personal touch or that customer service that most people lack in good business today.

Yes, speech recognition, layout software and computers as a whole definitively make our jobs easier, and possibly even much quicker to accomplish, but we here at ProTypists do not use SRS, and we choose the human touch to make sure that things are done accurately and definitively.

Get this… the normal human speaks English at approximately 140 words per minute. Most typists clock their skills in at about 60-70 words per minute. Some may be lucky to exceed that but what we are not taking into consideration is the characters that we don’t use in speech. Periods, question marks, quotes, and so much more. These can add up as well.

Most words used are averaged at 4.5 characters per word, that multiplied by the 140 words per minute in speech equals at whopping 630 characters per minute. Figure into that all the characters that typists need to include to make your projects English compliant (approximately 150 extra characters) and you will see 780 characters per minute that your transcriber puts to paper/computer screen.

Now, transcriptionists will type about 60 wpm and multiply that times the average length of a word at 4.5 and we see only a character amount of 270. This doesn’t include the punctuation which might equal around 50 extra characters in that. A total of 330 characters.

The ratio now is more than double of the spoken word vs the written word for each piece of audio we get. A normal transcriptionist will count on spending more than 2 minutes on each minute of transcription. Remember that next time you have a job that requires a quick turn around, your transcriber will appreciate it!