Here are the benefits:

First of all, typing is time consuming and stopping and starting audio files to transcribe them is even more time consuming than putting ‘fingers to keyboard.’ On average, it takes a trained and experienced audio typist three to four hours to type one hour of audio recording – that’s with foot pedals to speed up the process, and all of the necessary equipment to do a professional job. Without foot pedals, you’re looking at spending a heck of a lot of time typing – time that could be used to actually make a start on your core piece of work.

So the next question you may ask is, ‘Why don’t I just keep my recordings and then whizz through them when I need something?’ This seems like a really good idea, doesn’t it? So you’re writing your essay and you just remembered there was a brilliant quote that you want to use to help your argument on, let’s say, vacuum cleaners. The trouble is you have two and a half hours of audio and you can’t even remember which interviewee made the statement! Now, that’s a heck of a lot of time listening to audio and the process may feel a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack! Just think, if you had professional transcripts of your audio recordings, not only would you have those quotes to hand, already written down to just copy and paste, but you would be able to locate them in a fraction of the time. We type our transcripts into Word templates, so if you remember you had a quote on vacuum cleaners, you can just type that key word in using the ‘Find’ function and you’ll have your quote ready in seconds.

These two points not only demonstrate time saving for university students wanting to write up research, dissertations and essays but will also reap other rewards. If you are typing up an essay and you get into the middle of a really great idea you want to continue with, you want to keep that train of thought going. You don’t want to have to stop for three hours to look for a sentence to demonstrate your theories and ideas because if you do, once you’ve found that quote, you will probably have forgotten what your point was to start with. Students are always instructed to be organised when writing: to work in a clean, organised environment, to brainstorm and organise your ideas and have everything ready before writing. This is what a transcription services company such as Transcription City can help with – to take on the hard graft and organise your information resources (interviews) so you can concentrate on getting that brilliant mind of your working to the fullest.