Trade Tips: Save Your Time - Use Automated Transcription

If you write for a living, you likely conduct interviews.

And you probably record those interviews.

Which means you spend a lot of time transcribing interviews.

I don't know about you, but I hate transcribing.

Because... I suck at typing.

It takes me twice as long to transcribe an interview as it does to conduct the interview in the first place.

Typical transcription process:

Hit play. Start typing. Fall behind. Get frustrated. Backspace. Backspace. Pause audio. Correct typos. Resume. Stop caring about typos. Get more frustrated. Backspace. Continue...

Yuck. 

But then, my ah-ha! moment: 

In a previous Trade Tip, I told you about my text-to-speech reader discovery. If we can use artificial intelligence to convert the written word to audio, there must be options to convert audio files to text, right? 

Why in the -blank- didn't I think of that before?

Googles "automated transcriptions."

Magic. Gained hours of my life back.

Now I use Rev.com to convert audio interviews into text documents. 

It's $.25 per minute for a rough (automated) transcription. Yes, you will have to correct a few words here and there, but it's a heck of a lot faster than typing. 

You can also pay a bit more for a transcription by "a professional human" if you're looking for a more polished document. 

Big bonus: there's a pay-as-you-go option (in other words, no monthly contract required).

You can use speech-to-text to generate video captions and foreign subtitles, which is great for making your content more accessible.

You'll save time and money. And you can enjoy doing interviews again!

If you find this helpful, feel free to pass it along and share (or trade) this tip with your fellow writers.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay 

Trade Tips: Proofread With a Text-to-Speech Reader

What's your best tip for proofreading your own work?

I've tried so many tricks: read it aloud, read it backwards, print it out, touch each word with my finger while reading...

But I still miss things. Whole words, in fact. 

My brain fills in everything that I was supposed to type. No matter how hard I tried, I could never be confident I caught every typo (or miss-o, as it were). 

That was until Pamela Grow introduced me to my favourite new proofreading tool: text-to-speech readers. 

(Thank you, Pam. I owe you a beer or your beverage of choice when we get together someday). 

Text-to-speech readers are the coolest thing. You copy and paste your text into the tool, and it reads it out loud. Not only does it help me find missing words, it helps identify clunky portions of text, too. 

I use ttsreader.com. But there are several free versions out there if you Google speech to text readers.

You can choose from several voices, accents, and languages. 

My new proofreading partner is a UK male. And while he may be computer-generated, he's a great writing buddy (plus, when he reads my stuff in his British accent it always sounds smarter).

So, that's my trade tip for you. Feel free to pass it along to your fellow writers.

I'm looking forward to hearing your trade tips, too.

Image by Lorenzo Cafaro from Pixabay