Audio Transcription

Audio and Video Transcription

Definition

Audio transcription is the process of converting spoken language into written text. It creates structured text data from raw speech recordings.

Purpose

The purpose is to make speech searchable, analyzable, and usable for natural language processing tasks. It is widely used in accessibility, media, and business analytics.

Importance

  • Enables closed captioning and accessibility services.
  • Provides textual input for training NLP models.
  • Quality depends on accuracy of speech-to-text conversion.
  • Sensitive to background noise, accents, and recording quality.

How It Works

  1. Record or import audio files.
  2. Segment speech into smaller units.
  3. Apply automated speech recognition (ASR) or manual transcription.
  4. Correct and validate text for accuracy.
  5. Store transcripts with time-stamps or metadata if needed.

Examples (Real World)

  • Rev: transcription service for media and business.
  • Otter.ai: AI-based real-time meeting transcription.
  • YouTube: generates captions using ASR models.

References / Further Reading

  • Automatic Speech Recognition — NIST.
  • ISO/IEC 15938-4: Multimedia Content Description — ISO.
  • Speech and Language Processing — Jurafsky & Martin, Stanford.