College is a time of growth and learning. It can also—and I’m sure everyone will agree with me on this—be a stressful, years-long slog filled with looming deadlines and sleepless nights. The difficulty can exponentially increase when you pursue post-graduate education, especially when preparing for your dissertation. Any little thing can help.
Fortunately, academic transcription services provide invaluable and considerable assistance with thesis and dissertation preparation.
In this article, you’ll learn how:
- Transcription services can ease the burden of paperwork during thesis and dissertation preparation.
- Human transcription is significantly more accurate than automated transcription.
- Ditto Transcripts offers college and graduate students the best, most accurate services.
Why You Need Academic Transcription Services
Transcription is the process of converting audio to text. College students benefit from transcription by having video and audio recordings like classroom lectures, academic research, seminars, project reports, and other academic programs transcribed into easy-to-read, searchable text formats.
For dissertations, transcription can help with data gathering and organizing. Future Ph.D. graduates can shave off a lot of time by dictating thoughts or recording brainstorming sessions, then having them turned into text.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. University transcription services cost money, so why not record and transcribe them yourself?
Well, first off, transcription is complex and time-consuming. It’s not easy listening to an hour of audio recordings and typing down everything you hear on your laptop or smartphone. Generous estimates say transcribing audio to text takes about ten times as long for the uninitiated, so you’ll spend more time typing than listening.
Professional transcriptionists are expert typists, have access to captioning and transcription software, and have extensive experience with recordings from academic institutions.
Secondly, even if you were willing to spend the time transcribing your recordings, they may not be as accurate as you like. As said, transcription is difficult, and the sheer monotony of the task is not everyone’s cup of tea. So, that’s more time fixing inaccurate transcripts instead of focusing on other, more important matters like dissertations and lectures.
To be fair, all these issues are present in some transcription companies. Let’s talk about them next.
Are All Transcription Companies Equal?
Transcription is a broad industry, and the ease with which one can set up a transcription business and offer their services to colleges and universities is honestly scary. While the barrier to entry is low, the problem is that some may be seen as cheap, easy, and attractive. However, their dirt-cheap prices are often reflected in their results—definitely not worth your time and money.
| Feature | Benefit |
| Transcription can ease the burden of paperwork during thesis and dissertation preparation. | Transcription services can convert audio recordings into easy-to-read, searchable text formats, saving students time and effort. |
| Human transcription is significantly more accurate than automated transcription. | Human transcriptionists can provide more accurate transcripts than automated transcription services. |
| Ditto Transcripts offers college and graduate students the best, most accurate services. | Ditto Transcripts provides 100% U.S.-based transcription, more than 99% accuracy, fast turnaround times, top-notch customer service, unparalleled flexibility and customizability, and the highest level of security money can buy. |
Working with low-quality transcription providers can damage reputations, negatively affect grades, and completely undermine the reason why a student needs transcription in the first place.
AI Transcription
Another concern with dissertation and research transcription is your chosen company’s process. Generally, there are two types of providers: those who use human transcribers exclusively and those who use automated transcription.
Automated audio transcription converts audio or video recordings to plain text content using artificial intelligence (AI) or automated speech recognition (ASR) technologies. This type of transcription leverages the speed of AI and produces lightning-fast audio and video transcription. Automated transcription software and speech-to-text services are often cheaper than manual transcription.
Unfortunately, one major disadvantage negates all the benefits of using AI transcription.
You see, automated transcription is inaccurate, and the very best of them can only reach up to 86% accuracy. Academia requires precision in everything, and 86% is unacceptable. Furthermore, fixing that can take up much-needed time instead of saving time.
Automated transcription also doesn’t have document format options. The text will come in one unbroken stream, devoid of punctuation and other important elements, taking even more time to fix.
Furthermore, AI transcription doesn’t know how to think or have linguistic or contextual understanding. It is at the mercy of background noise, overlapping speakers, different accents and dialects, and poor audio file quality. It cannot identify nuance and utilize context to create a more accurate verbatim transcription—things that come naturally to experienced human transcriptionists.
Human Transcription
Human transcription can be slower because of its process, where a person listens and transcribes every word. However, the human transcription process ensures the highest accurate rates possible in transcription.
Even then, turnaround times for human transcription aren’t even that slow. Services like ours can provide transcripts within 4 hours, which is practically the same amount of time it would take for an automated transcription provider to produce, proofread, and submit a half-decent transcript anyway.
So, choosing the right outsourced transcription provider like Ditto Transcripts can save you from the headache of inaccurate transcripts, ridiculously extended turnaround times, and missed deadlines. We offer transcription solutions for academics of all types. We’ll handle everything to ensure accurate, timely, and affordable documents for your projects. All our transcripts are guaranteed to be 99% accurate.
How To Leverage Audio Transcription For Dissertations
Grad students stand to benefit from using professional transcription services like Ditto Transcripts. Here are some ways audio transcription can help:
Organizing Data
A wise man once said, “The only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.” Well, actually, it was Adam Savage who said it, but the point still stands.
Dissertations or theses require data collection from interviews, focus groups, and other recorded content. These often come in the form of audio or video recordings because, really, who has the time to scribble everything down? You’d also have to contend with mountains of paperwork afterward.
Transcribing this content can help grad students store, search, and organize data collected from their sources. Transcripts can be uploaded and accessed from anywhere with any device with an internet connection or storage capabilities, like smartphones and laptops.
Accuracy
Data analysis necessitates precise data sets to gather the most relevant details for the study. Unfortunately, having researchers take down notes while watching interviews may cause inaccuracies in collected data. Fatigue and stress can cause misinterpretation or errors, further tainting the data.
Transcripts present the fullest and most accurate representation of recordings. By implementing transcription, grad students can maintain the accuracy and integrity of their data-gathering processes for dissertations. Of course, these benefits can only be gleaned from accurate transcripts. However, some transcription processes produce more accurate results than others.
Easy Quoting and Referencing
Having transcripts makes it easier to reference specific participants in your paper.
Accurate quoting and referencing can enhance the validity and credibility of your arguments and overall study, ensuring that context is maintained and every nuance is observed and recorded for referencing.
This is important from both a researcher’s and a participant’s standpoint.
Meeting Ethical Standards
Maintaining the ethical requirements of research is an important lesson for many students. Any research study done in the academic field should protect the dignity, privacy, rights, and welfare of everyone involved. Furthermore, any ethical research must ensure the integrity of research results, including any participant’s right to be represented as accurately as possible.
Aside from that, grad students must understand that it is their social and professional responsibility to maintain the public’s trust in science. Any research project or dissertation must present data as objectively as possible.
Academic transcription can help with this by presenting an objective, unfiltered data view. Verbatim transcripts are the best for this, as they capture every word and utterance during the research interviews.
Faster Preparation and Presentation
So you’ve racked up hundreds of hours of recordings while gathering data. What now? Do you sit and spend hours listening and writing down every detail you need from the recorded audio? Or, maybe, you need to deal with the scattered notes taken during the interviews.
Avoid all these issues by transcribing audio. The final transcripts are all searchable, allowing you to breeze through the data-collection process and save precious time. Additionally, reading and presenting transcripts or parts is easier than listening to audio or video content snippets.
Accessibility
Higher education institutions are often equitable, providing the same opportunities for everyone and accommodating students with disabilities (in this case, specifically those students who are deaf or hard of hearing.) They, and by extension, you, should enhance accessibility for everyone.
Having audio and video recordings transcribed makes your content accessible to students with hearing issues. Captions can be placed on the video themselves, or transcripts can be prepared and provided to those who need them.
Scalability
It doesn’t matter if you have a high volume of recordings for transcription. Professional transcription companies can work with any demand and get it transcribed within their guaranteed time frames.
Higher Education Institutions and Graduate Students Benefit From Ditto Transcripts
Get the best possible service with Ditto Transcripts at the most affordable costs. Streamline your dissertation with our 100% U.S.-based transcription, more than 99% accuracy, fast turnaround times, top-notch customer service, unparalleled flexibility and customizability, and the highest level of security money can buy.
Ditto Transcripts is a HIPAA-compliant and CJIS-compliant Denver, Colorado-based academic transcription services company that provides fast, accurate, and affordable transcripts for individuals and companies of all sizes. Call (720) 287-3710 today for a free quote, and ask about our free five-day trial.
