AI Transcription Vs Human Transcription: What’s The Most Secure Way?
Transcriptions of meetings will bring you, your employees and your company many benefits. It will always happen that some employees have to skip an important meeting due to private reasons (maybe their kid had a doctor’s appointment) or due to professional reasons (they had to go on a business trip). If we are talking about an employee with high responsibilities within the company it is more than important for them to be familiar with everything that has been said at the meeting. So, what can be done to make that happen? Of course, someone is always in charge to write minutes of the meeting, which than can be a good source for the missing employee, but you might ask yourself will that really be enough.
On the other hand, you might record the whole meeting, so that the employees who weren’t able to attend can practically listen to the whole meeting and be as informed as if they were present in person. But meetings often take up to an hour and it might be a bit too much to expect that employees listen to the whole recording especially considering that there are more important things for them to do. One more possibility is to transcribe the recorded meeting. This seems like the best solution because than way employees can be more informed than if they just read the minutes, since they can take a grasp at everything that has been said without losing too much precious time while listening to the whole meeting.
It is also important to mention that many companies employ people with disabilities. So, if one or more of your employees is deaf or has a hearing problem it might be difficult for them to keep track and understand everything that is said at the meeting. You need to know that sometimes lip-reading isn’t going to be enough: maybe someone is speaking very fast or the speaker has a heavy accent and this would probably make that hearing-impaired employee feel excluded. This is where transcriptions come in handy, because if you are transcribing meetings you are showing to the employees that the company stands for an all-inclusive policy, since even the employees who have some sort of hearing problem can get the whole picture and be completely included in the meeting as valuable members of the company.
As you can see, transcribing a meeting can be very important for the company. But you also need to be careful. Transcripts shouldn’t leak any important information to the public or to your competition. This could have a tremendous effect on your business. Your products and ideas should stay in the company until the time is right to show it to the world.
If you want to transcribe your meetings in a very secure way, you should think about using a software that relies on artificial intelligence. This way of transcribing is called automated transcription and it is a great tool for transcribing your meetings, since it transcribes in a fast and accurate manner, and at the same time it is very secure.
Today, artificial technology has come a long way. It has developed the possibility of speech recognition. This makes it easy to translate the spoken word directly into the text format, which we call AI transcription. With other words we can say that automatic speech recognition technology allows us to take spoken audio, interpret it and generate text from it.
Probably you have used this technology before without even thinking about it. At this point we only need to mention Siri or Alexa and I am sure that everyone knows what we are talking about. As you can see, speech recognition already plays a great part in our lives, even though it is still quite simple and limited. We also need to underline that the technology has matured to the level where mistakes in transcriptions are not so common and researchers are putting lots of effort into further improving this field. It is important to take into considerations that there are many expressions, collocations, slang and accents which all need to be learned by the software and this will still take some time. But during a meeting a more formal register is usually being used. So, AI will most likely do a pretty good job transcribing.
That all being said, let us compare a human transcriber to a transcription software and see what advantages and disadvantages each of them can offer.
Let’s start with the human transcriber. In most cases we are talking about trained professionals. Their job is to listen to the audio file of the meeting and write down by typing all that has been said. The result will most likely be very accurate. But you need to know that another human being will know the content of your meeting, which you maybe want to keep confidential. Of course, we advise you to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement), but can you still be 100 % sure that everything will stay between you and the transcriber. We are all just humans and most humans like to gossip. We are of course not talking about all human transcribers, but for some of them it might be very hard to keep their mouth shut about interesting new ideas and products that are coming out next fall. Or, maybe in the meeting more sensitive content might be discussed, which you really don’t want to have out in the public.
On the other hand, AI transcription is done by a machine and no human has access to those documents. We can say that this is indeed a very confidential way to transcribe your meeting.
When talking about confidentiality there is one more important thing to mention and that is the problematic data storage. You don’t really know where and how the transcriber stores the data. But when we are talking about AI transcriptions, you know that you are the only person who uploads the audio files and downloads the text file. It is up to you to edit and/or delete all the files uploaded and the downloaded transcripts. Thus, the documents and their content are safe and stay between you and the machine.
Maybe, it some point it crossed your mind that you can delegate the task of transcribing meetings to an employee working at your company. This maybe seems like a great idea, since the employee works at the company, so there isn’t any additional danger that any companies’ secret plans are going to leak. Nevertheless, most of the time this idea is not so good as you might perceive. Transcribing an audio file is a process in which you need to put a lot of effort. If the employees in question are not trained transcriptionists it will take lots of time for them to get the job done. A transcriptionist needs to listen to the original audio file around three times. They need to have a good typing speed and this requires the transcriptionist to be able to use muscle memory to find keys fast, i.e. typing without looking at the keyboard. The goal here is to use all fingers, just like piano players do. This is called touch typing and it significantly improves the typing speed. A transcriptionist also needs to have good tools which will help them with all of this, for example a foot pedal, and the knowledge of how to use it. Take into consideration that to do 1 hour of transcript a good trained transcriptionist needs to work around 4 hours.
So now, we ask you: Is this really the best task to give to your employees or should they do the job they were in the first place hired to do? A machine can do a decent transcription of a one-hour meeting in just a couple of minutes. Maybe a better way to approach this problematic is to give the transcriptionist the task of editing the text of the meeting when it is already transcribed. They can check the accuracy and change some minor things that need to be improved, and they can do this without losing hours of their valuable time. If you chose to do it this way you will have an accurate transcription without mistakes and at the same time you can make sure that no one outside of the company has access to information being shared at the meetings in your company.
To conclude this article, we can say that AI transcription service is a more secure way of transcribing your meetings than a transcription done by a human being, due to the fact that no other human being is involved in the process of transcription. You could at a later stage of transcribing assign it to an employee to check and edit the text if needed.
AI software utilized by Gglot makes accurate transcriptions in a short time period. You don’t have to worry about confidentiality since no human will have access to your data. Try this safe and effective new way of transcribing and share the content of your meetings with all your colleagues.