Breaking Down the Process of Transcribing Video Content

Imagine you have a video recording that’s ready to go. You prepared the clips and smoothened all the transitions; all that is left is transcribing the audio. Unfortunately, this can be one of the most tedious parts of the process. One hour of audio can take several hours to transcribe. However, it’s not something you can leave behind because this transcription is necessary and beneficial for your content.

Why Attain a Transcription?

Although the transcription process is often difficult and lengthy, several reasons make it essential. First, textual transcriptions help increase hits on search engines. Also, the audience’s experience and engagement with your content improves. If the audience is deaf, hard of hearing, or does not speak the recorded language, a transcription vastly enhances their experience.

Improve Search Engine Hits

Whenever a new video hits the internet, any associated text helps increase its crawlability by search engine robots. A complete transcription is a significant amount of text, but every word contributes to raising search engine hits. Therefore, a complete and accurate transcription is crucial for gaining more viewers.

Better Experience for the Audience

In addition to helping the creators, transcripts also benefit the audience. Often, audiences appreciate having the transcript to follow along with while watching a video. Sometimes their visual processing is better than their auditory processing, and some other times, the audio is not as clear or loud as they would like. Transcripts provide an improved audience experience.

Creators also have the option to create an interactive transcript, which means the transcript would contain links so viewers can jump to that time in the video. Creators can also insert links to additional content or other relevant information.

More Accessible

One of the most obvious reasons to include a transcription is to make a video more accessible. It allows deaf and hard-of-hearing people to enjoy audiovisual content. This characteristic further diversifies and expands the video’s audience. Such content without transcription is practically unattainable for these groups.

Helpful for Language Learners

Transcription is also beneficial for another segment of the audience: language learners. It’s not uncommon for language learners to want to watch videos in their target language. As previously mentioned, some viewers have better reading capabilities than listening capabilities. Therefore, a transcript in the target language could benefit non-native speakers in their learning. Including options for transcripts in different languages would be even better to make your videos reach a broader audience.

Transcription Methods

There are two main methods you can choose to prepare a transcription. The first is human transcription. Here, a real person listens to the audio and writes it down word for word. The second is an automatic transcription. This approach requires speech-recognition software. The software processes the audio and provides a transcript. Each method has its own pros and cons.

· Human Transcription

When an actual, living human creates a transcript, it is more likely to be accurate. Humans can recognize irregularities in a speech to make a transcription that makes sense. They can also pick up on nuances in the audio that may be important to note. Perhaps a particular sound would be complex for a non-human entity to identify. Humans can easily watch and listen to a video to infer the sound and context.

Despite these advantages, human transcription takes a lot longer than automatic transcription. Depending on the complexity, one audio hour can take two, three, four, or even more hours of human labor. If you are on a deadline, this certainly is not ideal. You could make up for it by having more than one human work on the transcription.

· Automatic Transcription

Automatic transcriptions are becoming more common because they are efficient and require little to no cost. As previously mentioned, one hour of audio can take several hours for a human to transcribe. Automatic transcription software can transcribe that same audio in as little as ten minutes, if not less. This aspect saves you a significant amount of time. Also, you don’t have to hire any additional labor to improve the speed at which you complete transcriptions. Automatic transcription saves the pain and cost of having to employ human labor.

On the other hand, automatic transcriptions usually contain many more mistakes than human transcriptions. Even though the software is a great, innovative tool, it is not perfect. As with any AI product, there will always be things that the machine will misread or miss entirely. Additionally, machines can’t pick up on heavy accents and have trouble differentiating multiple speakers. They are not able to add the nuance that human transcribers can.

Recommendation

Implementing transcriptions alongside your video content will help you attain a plethora of benefits, such as improved SEO, more accessibility, and just a better overall experience for your audience. If you have to transcribe text from a video, there are two approaches you can follow: human and automatic. Even though both have their own advantages and disadvantages, human is the best option if you want to provide your audience with the high quality they deserve. Consider partnering with a trustable company that can help you realize all the benefits transcription can bring to your videos.

Rupali Gupta

Rupali Gupta is a blogger and professional writer who loves to write about technology and entertainment. Techzimo is one of her successful websites filled with great tech news, Know more about her on Youtube Facebook Twitter Linkedin Instagram