Tips for Editing Automated Transcripts
The quality of AI generated transcripts can vary wildly in quality. Whether carried out on Zoom, Teams or another automated transcript service, they can range from excellent, particularly for clear, single speaker dictation, to so wrong you wonder what the AI was listening to!
When I have an automated transcript to edit, I carry out some initial checks. These include:
- A lot of automated transcripts have single spacing between the lines of text. For me, this makes the transcript very difficult to read on screen, so the first thing I do is change the line spacing to 1.5 (under the Paragraph menu). You can always change this back to single once you have finished checking the transcript.
- AI generated transcripts can add timestamps in random places or put them in so frequently it makes the transcript difficult to read. If these are not required by the client, I like to remove all the timestamping ready to add my own at more useful intervals. I do this using Find & Replace (CTRL H), and the Special dropdown menu for digits, to ensure they are all picked up.
- Ums and ers. Unless your transcript needs to be verbatim, a lot of the ums and ers can be removed from an automated transcript, particularly for those at the beginning of a sentence, which are often more habitual than relevant. I use Find & Replace again to replace as many as possible, e.g. replacing “Um, a” with “A” will replace all of those “Um, and…” with “And…” (ensure you have Match Case selected).
- Spelling errors. If there are place names, personal names, acronyms or project related terminology that the AI is likely to mishear, I scan through and do a Find & Replace for these words and phrases to ensure they are spelt correctly.
- Some qualitative data research software does not like tabs, so, if required by the client, I remove these using the Find & Replace Special dropdown menu to replace tabs with a single space.
These can be completed pretty quickly and will make the transcript much easier to read and edit when you start comparing the content against the audio recording.
Here’s a little video of the steps I follow when I start editing a new automated transcript:
Editing Ai generated transcripts can still be a very time-consuming task, and there is more risk of errors being missed if the automated transcript is peppered with them. Sometimes it is quicker (and therefore more cost effective if using a transcription service) to start from scratch. This can particularly be the case for recordings with multiple speakers, strong accents or project related terminology, but AI is certainly improving and these tips can really help!
Please feel free to get in touch to discuss our automated transcript editing service, or if you would like to find out more about our professional transcription service.