Audio transcription is one of the oldest language services with a long history of converting speech into text formats. Tradition isn’t making audio transcription any less relevant though. In fact, transcription is more important than ever in the modern age of content consumption.
This article explores the key benefits and advantages of audio transcription, demonstrating why this could be the most important language service of them all.
What is audio transcription?
Audio transcription creates a text transcript of the dialogue in audio or video content. As people engage with more video and audio content (e.g. podcasts) in the digital age, audio transcription plays an increasingly important role in content marketing strategies.
Transcription also plays a more traditional role in industries like journalism, translation and many more. Journalists will often record and transcribe speeches, interviews and other spoken interactions for reference and accurate quotations.
Likewise, transcription is the first step in many translation services, such as video subtitling translation.
What are the key benefits of audio transcription?
Aside from the traditional benefits of audio transcription, this service is bringing new benefits to the modern world of content marketing.
- Accessibility: Providing transcriptions for your video and audio content makes them more accessible to audiences with hearing difficulties and who are not native speakers of the language(s) used in the audio.
- Comprehension: People are generally able to digest and retain information more effectively in text format.
- Scanning: Scanning through a transcript for information is easier than scrolling through video or audio clips.
- Summaries: Transcripts provide all the text you need to create summaries of your video and audio content.
- SEO: Text transcripts make your video and audio content easier for search engines to index and rank.
- Content repurposing: Transcripts for video and audio content are great for turning into blog posts and other text content formats.
- Quotes: Transcripts provide quotes for promoting your content and reference it in other pieces.
- Social posts: You can use snippets from your transcript to create social posts.
- Referencing: Text transcripts make it easier for others to quote and reference your content without transcribing it themselves (and potentially getting it wrong).
- Sound-sensitive environments: People can read your content instead of listening/watching in settings where it is not suitable to play audio or surrounding noise will drown it out.
- Translation: Transcription makes it easier to translate video and audio content into other languages.
Transcription makes your video and audio content more accessible to people in a wider variety of situations. It also helps you get more out of your content by making it easier to repurpose into text formats, giving you all the material you need to promote your content with snippets and quotes.
Keep in mind that some people simply don’t want to watch or listen to content or they may not be in a position to do so. A good example is when people are using public transport, and they don’t want to disrupt others when using the phones (or when parents don’t want to disrupt their kids’ sleep).
By providing transcripts with your video and audio content, you make it accessible to the vast majority of your target audience – whatever scenario they find themselves in.
This is particularly important with content discovery as when people find your content for the first time, they probably won’t return unless they can access your content right now.
Do you need a quality transcription service?
If you need transcription services or you think your content strategy could benefit from being more accessible, our team can help. To speak to one of our transcription specialists, please fill out the form on our contact page and we’ll get back to you.