[Air-l] transcription

[Christian Nelson]

I should've mentioned that which transcription software is best depends 
on what you are doing. If you are transcribing your own voice, then 
DragonNS might be OK. But if you are transcribing another person's 
talk, or that of a whole group, the utility of DragonNS becomes 
questionable at best, because Dragon must be trained to the voice(s) it 
is transcribing before it can be used, and it is rarely the case that 
you can get someone other than yourself to take the time to complete 
the initial training, much less stick around to make corrections during 
the transcription process. So, if you want to automate transcription of 
other people's talk, you usually have to recreate other people's talk 
in your own voice (i.e., listen to what they say through headphones and 
then repeat it into the microphone of another recording device), and 
then train the software to your voice. And then you have to contend 
with the fact that, though Dragon is probably the best voice 
recognition software out there, it's not very good even on a single 
voice. I found that you have to talk very slowly, at an unnaturally 
steady pace to get it to work at all, and even then I had a lot of 
corrections to make. Just transcribing on my own was at least as fast 
if not faster. From the forums I looked at a couple years ago, it 
seemed like my experience was typical, and it seemed that most of the 
folks who used DragonNS, ViaVoice, etc. were folks who couldn't 
manipulate a keyboard or folks  like lawyers and salespeople who used 
it to transcribe brief memos they recorded while in the car or hunched 
over documents. I should also mention that an alternative to 
transcribing on your own is paying a service to do so. I think that 
standard rates for this, and related topics have been discussed on 
either the qualsoft list or the languse email lists, both of which are 
good resources for questions about transcription. Of course, if you 
have someone else transcribe, you'll still have to review the 
transcription for accuracy to the recordings, etc. Finally, here are a 
couple sites with a lot of language analysis (including transcription) 
software. descriptions and reviews:
http://www.qualitativeresearch.uga.edu/QualPage/qda.html
http://www.textanalysis.info/
Best,
Christian Nelson

On Mar 3, 2006, at 8:11 AM, Isabel Alvarez wrote:

> I would like to have any information concerning transcription 
> software. I
> know the existence of DRAGON professional, but I haven't use it. Any
> thoughts? Thank you so much. Isabel
>
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