As a transcription company, we always keep an eye on what is happening in the AI world and alternatives to straightforward typing – our robot competitors! So we tried some speech to text options ourselves.
And many chuckles were had.
The winner was ‘terrorist’ instead of ‘terraced’.
'Outstanding' instead of 'damp staining' and 'tenure' became '10 year'.
But there were also the likes of 'carriages' instead of 'garages', 'artic' instead of 'Artex' - speech to text just doesn’t understand the context in the way an experienced property audio typist will.
Say 'full stop paragraph' you will see the words 'full stop paragraph' - no experienced human audio typist will do that!
One service missed out not only the odd word here and there but also nearly whole paragraphs.
Some are better than others, this is true, and some work well if sitting in a quiet room and your document is on ‘plain paper’ without formatting – no tables, no bold, no heading styles, all those things that make your documents look great.
But even the simplest, most straightforward emails dictated in an office environment still bring up errors.
Our conclusion is a human typist still beats the robots, especially for professionals producing professional looking documents who need to spend their time thinking about what they are dictating and not how they are dictating.
From our research, by the time you have amended the misunderstandings of the 'robot' and formatted your document to look great, any potential time/cost saved by not using an audio typist is lost.
A professional audio typist gets when you are instructing or dictating without you telling them, no formal dictating procedures – just speak clearly, not too fast or too slow (chatting speed) and, to be kind to your audio typist, try to stand out of the wind.
If you are a chartered surveyor and need documents prepared quickly, accurately and professionally so you can get on with your next fee-earning job, the humans at BackupTyping are always on hand. We speak your language!
BackupTyping is a chartered surveying specialist transcription company working with a variety of clients from large corporations to small niche companies, all receiving the same high quality and fast service from a team of audio typists who worked at senior levels in chartered surveying organisations. For human contact - Call: 020 7096 1663 or Email: lorna@backuptyping.co.uk
