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Audio Transcription, Perfected

Transcription Guide
Introduction
Transcription is the first step of our 4-step process. As a certified
transcriber on Scribie.com you can login to your account and select any
of the available files for transcription. Once your submission reaches
the next step, i.e., is reviewed, the amount for that file will be
credited to your account. Your earnings will accumulate in your account
and you can withdraw it to your PayPal account anytime.

The payment rate for transcription varies from $5/ah to $20/ah (ah stands
for audio hour). For some high difficulty level files, an additional
payment is also made if the grade is 3 or more after the file has been
delivered to the customer (i.e., when all the 4-steps are complete). We
also pay a monthly bonus for 3 or more hours completed each month.

This guide provides the rules and other details about the raw
transcription step of the process. It is intended for our certified
transcribers as a guide and also as a reference. For any questions or
suggestions, please contact support.

Transcription Guidelines
The transcription guideline is a set of rules that should be always
followed. Please memorize these rules and adhere to them as strictly as
possible. All these rules are considered while grading.

Never violate these rules:

Files which do not contain any spoken audio and/or contain only
background conversation should be reported instead of being submitted
with a placeholder. Please also report any files with poor audio quality,
distortions, distant speakers, high background or ambient noise and/or
difficult accents so that it can be investigated. Such files may be
returned to the customer which will lead to your submission being
automatically cancelled.

The raw transcript should not contain text other than the spoken
audio. No headers/footers, speaker tracking, time-codes, comments
etcetera.
No part of the audio should be omitted, unless specified otherwise by
an instruction or another guideline.
Inaudible parts should be omitted and marked with a blank ____.
Laughter should be omitted and marked with [laughter] or [chuckle].
Ellipsis ... should be used to indicate unfinished sentences or mid-
sentence pauses.
Contractions, wanna, gonna, kinda, gotta, should not be expanded.
 Numbers one to nine should be transcribed in letters and numerals
otherwise, except for measurements.
The number of mistakes should not be greater than 2 for every 10
comprehensible words spoken in the audio.
A new paragraph should be started at each change of speaker and
paragraphs should be separated by an empty line.
Fillers (right, you know, I think, like, I mean, so, actually,
basically), false starts and stutters should be omitted, unless
necessary, and should be included for strict verbatim files.
Utterances should be omitted for non-strict verbatim files, unless
necessary. For strict verbatim files, only the following utterances
should be transcribed: Mm-hmm if in agreement, Uh-huh if in disagreement,
Umm and Uh.

Additional Notes:

The minimum accuracy requirement is 2 out of 10 words which equates

to 80%. Also, blanks which are filled during review are considered
mistakes.
For Guideline VII, measurements are considered as anything which has
a unit (kg, ml, currency units, etcetera).
For Guideline X, the filler words specified have to be frequently
repeated by a speaker during the conversation to be considered a filler.
In-frequent usage of those words should be transcribed.
False starts are when the speaker starts a statement but immediately
corrects it to something else.
For Guideline XI, all files are non-strict verbatim by default.
Strict verbatim files are indicated by an instruction on the file.
Therefore if the instruction is not present, all utterances, fillers,
false starts, stutters should be omitted. If the instruction is present,
nothing should be omitted and the raw transcript should match the audio
word for word.
The only case when an utterance is required in a non-strict verbatim
file is when it is a response to a direct question. The unless necessary
part of Guideline XI specifies that.

Style Suggestions
The following are some styles that we recommend using in the transcript.
This list is not exhaustive. If you require additional guidance, please
contact support.

The following are recommendations and not rules. Any style change is
considered subjective and are not to be counted while grading. The focus
of transcription is always on accuracy, not on styles. Transcripts are
not prose and the punctuation and grammar rules for prose do not apply
here.

Punctuations are free style. Please use your discretion on placement

of commas, periods, semicolons, exclamations etc.
Spelling styles are different for each file and the styles suggested
by the spell check should be followed.
All proper nouns should be first letter capitalized, e.g., names of
places, person, organizations, job titles, etcetera.
 Spelled out names should be all capitalized and separated by hyphens.
E.g. A-D-A-M.
Use etcetera instead of etc.
Use i.e., instead of ie.
Use e.g., instead of Eg.
Alright and All right are both acceptable.
A statement can begin with an And.
Generic drug names should be all lowercase and branded drug names
should be first letter capitalized. Google once to check if they are
generic or branded.
Special marking schemes for phonetics and spelling should not be
used. Blanks should be used instead.
Periods should not be used in acronyms. E.g. PhD instead of Ph.D.
Phonetics such as Alpha, Bravo, Tango should be transcribed as ABT.
The following examples further illustrates Transcription Guideline
VII.
Time: 10:00 AM
Date: March 2, 2012
Temperature: 5 degrees
Money: $5, $500,000, $5 Billion
Percentage: 5%
Speed: 5 miles per hour
Dimension: 6 x 10, 5 feet 2 inches
Address: 213, 2nd Street
Era: in your 20s, in the 90s
Rank: ninth, 10th

Sample Raw Transcript (how your transcription should

look)
The following is a sample raw transcript which illustrates the formatting
required.

Highlights
There is no speaker tracking, eg. interviewer/interviewee, person
1/person 2 etc. There are also no time codes. Both of these are not
required for raw transcript.
The transcript is broken into paragraphs on each change of speaker.
Each speakers continuous diction is on one single paragraph and
paragraphs are separated by empty lines.
Inaudible parts are marked with a blank, ____ to make it stand out
from the rest of the transcript. These blanks may or may not get filled
during review, but are always checked.

Raw Transcript:

Hello.

Hello.

Yes. Rajiv can you hear me?

Yeah, I can hear you.

Hi. This is Austin Taun from Taipei, Taiwan.

Hi Austin. How are you?

I'm fine. Okay... So today, Rajiv could you first introduce yourself a
little bit?

Sure. Well I'm a Telecom ____ here. I graduated sometime in 1999. And
after that I worked for some various companies out here. My last company
that I worked for was Lucent. And then after that I started off on my
own. And for the past two years I've been trying to do this Sedna
Wireless thing. As part of Sedna Wireless we released Call Graph.

Okay. The reason that I know your company, Sedna Wireless is because this
product Call Graph, yeah, I think thats, if I think correctly its kind of
like Skype recorder. Its like a plugin for Skype, right.

It is a call recording application for Skype. It works in the background

and it records all your calls into an mp3 file. And then you can play it
back, you can search through your call records. Its basically meant
for... Its a productivity application. Somebody who would like to have
records of his calls, he can use our software.

Yes. And the reason that I found it interesting is that, I'm not sure if
you aware of this fact, your software Call Graph seems to be the only one
that can be used for free! And with the functionality of Stereo. What I
mean is that your software Call Graph can record the conversation into
separate audio tracks. So that will be perfect choice for Podcasts.
Because most of the ___ come into the situation that the two people have
different volumes. So it will be very very hard to do the modification,
to do the post production.

Right. Thats true. We record it in separate tracks which makes it very

easy to edit the files. You can use any external audio editor. For
example, Audacity is a very good audio editor. And you can export the
tracks separately. Plus there is also a feature in which you can record
the calls in a wav file. So if you do record the calls in a wav file then
you don't lose any quality. The quality is maintained, of the call.

Yes. So I think, frankly there are other software in the market that
provide the same functionality of separate tracks. But they all require,
a little bit registration fee. So its a very very outstanding point, from
my point of view.

Yes. Great that you like Call Graph.

So I think you should emphasize this point. I actually spent several days
to search through the Internet about Skype recording solutions. And I was
very surprised that Call Graph was not mentioned very much. It only has
50,000 Google hits, compared to other software, maybe several million
hits.
Well one of the reason is that we released it recently, its around just
two months old. And it got covered by a few popular weblogs, few popular
Blogs. For example LifeHacker covered us. And DownloadSquad covered us.
But I guess it takes some time to spread through the Google's network.

Performance
We use a 5 point scale for grading each file. It ranges from A+
(Excellent/5) to D (Poor/1). The average of these grades, called the
Average Transcription Grade, is used to monitor the performance. The
following rules apply for the Average Transcription Grade.

These rules come into effect only after 1 audio hour of submissions
has been reviewed.
Only reviewed and rejected files are considered in the average grade;
canceled or timed out files are not counted. Rejected files have a score
of 0.

The minimum Average Transcription Grade is 2.5 . Your account will be

disabled if it falls below that mark anytime.
The running average grade has to be maintained over 3 for the last
audio hour of submissions and transcription will be disabled for a week
if the average grade is lower.
The minimum Average Transcription Grade required for promotion to
reviewer is 3.25.

Once transcription is disabled, the only way to get it enabled is to

dispute the files. This minimum grade is fixed and is enforced
automatically. We cannot raise your average grade and neither can we
assign any additional files to help you improve.

Grading Criteria
The following is the grading criteria which is used for grading raw
transcripts. The word error rate is used to determine the grade.

Because of our 4-step process, each file is reviewed at least 3 times and
some are reviewed up to 8 times. The grades are subject to change as and
when more mistakes are found. Therefore the initial review grade is not
final and may change. Check the History tab for the latest grade.

Audio quality, accents, past performance, etcetera, are not grading factors. The only factor is
major changes.

Grades are based on major changes found in the assignment. The following lists all the types of
changes and their category.
 Category Type Description
Words which sound similar but differ in meaning, e.g., allude and
Soundalike major
elude.
Mishear major The spoken word does not match the typed word
Omission major Words which were spoken but not typed
Misspell major A spelling mistake, e.g., typo
Filler minor Frequently repeated words or phrases, e.g., like
False start minor A phrase followed by an immediate correction
Style change minor A change of style which does not alter the meaning, e.g., percent to %
Subjective
minor Any change which does not alter the meaning
change

The following table lists the grade corresponding to the number of major changes, for a 6-
minute file.

Grade Number of Major changes

Rejected 16 or more
Poor (D/1) 13 - 15
Bad (C/2) 10 - 12
Average (B/3) 7 - 9
Good (A/4) 4-6
Excellent (A+/5) 0 - 3

Tab Completion
Press tab to complete the current word

The editor has built-in tab completion functionality. It provides

suggestions as you type in a popup window below the cursor. You can
accept the suggestion by pressing the Tab key or close the popup by
pressing the Escape key. These suggestions are designed to reduce the
amount of typing required during transcription, sometimes by as much as
50% if used effectively.

Tab completions can also complete frequently occurring words in the file,
even without the popup. Press the Tab key to check if any completions are
available after typing the first 3 characters.

The tab completion feature can be turned off from the dropdown menu next
to the timer.
Diffs
Do not be blinded by minor changes when checking diffs. A major change is
a mishear or any change which alters the meaning.

Diffs, short for differences, show the changes that were made during the
review. The parts in red denote the removals whereas the parts in green
are the additions. The compare link in the History tab brings up the diff
for any file. The original transcript is not changed during the review;
the changes are made on a copy.

While inspecting the diffs, please pay attention to the major changes
since only those are considered as mistakes. Sometimes there are lots of
minor changes and few major changes and it may seem that the grade is
wrong, whereas the major changes were the important ones. Minor changes
are stylistic or subjective changes which do not alter the meaning of the
what was spoken in the audio. For example punctuation changes are
considered minor.

Please also note that reviews are done anonymously to avoid any bias.

Review Disputes
We encourage you to dispute the review if you find any mistakes in it or
if the grade is unfair. Different reviewers grade differently and
sometimes files are mis-graded because of that. Sometimes the reviewer
also introduces mistakes in the transcript. Such things should be brought
to our attention via disputes. To raise a dispute, please click the
compare link in the History tab and click the Dispute button at the
bottom. If you want us to check specific timestamps, please mention them
in the comments. Check the full reviewed transcript for the timestamps.

Please note that the audio is not available after the file has been
submitted. Due to confidentiality requirements, we have to restrict
access to the audio files strictly on a need to know basis. However you
can mention the relevant time stamps and we will investigate those parts
and check if the review was correct or your version is correct. However,
please do not use the comments box for questions. Contact email or live
chat support for that.

We always investigate the disputes once the file has been delivered to
the customer and make sure that all files are correctly graded. Disputes
take around a week to investigate.

Background Conversation
Always transcribe background conversation if it is clear and audible

Background conversation is very subjective and different people perceive

it differently. Customers are certain to return the file if they
disagree. Therefore it should be used as sparingly as possible. The thumb
rule is: if it is audible and clear, it should be transcribed. If the
file is strict verbatim, all background conversations should be
transcribed.

However there are some clear cases. Eg. a waiter's voice in between an
interview being conducted in a restaurant is definitely background
conversation. The audience chatter before a speech is also background
conversation. Another common example is the discussion amongst off-camera
crew members in a video interview or commercial; the direct questions and
answers are important, the discussion about lighting and other things are
background conversation.

On the other hand, if a voice goes faint at any time (e.g.

muttering/whispering), then it should be blank rather than a background
conversation. If you are unsure then you should transcribe it or insert a
blank and leave it up to the QAs to decide.

If any part of the audio is omitted as background conversation but

transcribed in later stages of our process, then it will be counted as a
mistake. Conversely, if any transcribed parts are removed and marked as
background conversation, it is not counted as a mistake. To be on the
safer side, you should always transcribe all parts of the audio if it is
clear and audible.

Monthly Bonus
We pay a monthly bonus of $5 for every 3 hours credited over the period
of the calendar month. The following are the rules for the bonus.

The amount is credited on the 1st day of each calendar month, for the
previous calendar month.
Only submissions which have been credited (i.e.
reviewed/proofread/qc'ed/approved) in the previous calendar month are
counted.
Submissions which are un-credited are carried over and counted in
next month's bonus calculation.
Our timezone is +5:30 UTC. Therefore calendar month starts at 12:00
AM UTC +5:30 of the first day of the month and ends at 12:00 AM UTC +5:30
of the last day of the month.
You will be notified via email if your Earnings Credit mail
notification setting is enabled.

Additional Earnings
We pay an additional amount for some files which are high difficulty and
may require additional time and effort to transcribe. These files are
marked as such on the Available files tab. The additional earning is
credited only after the file is delivered to the customer and the grade
was 3 or more after delivery. The delivery date depends on the schedule,
but it takes less than a week for most files. You will receive an email
notification if your Earnings Credit email notification is enabled.
Timeouts
Each transcription assignment has a timeout of 2 hours. The timeout can
be extended once after the initial 2 hours has elapsed. The extension
granted is 1 hour. Therefore in total, the assignment has to be submitted
within 3 hours.

The Request Extension option is available in the dropdown menu next to

the timer. It is enabled only when the initial time has elapsed, i.e.
when the timer starts blinking.

A grace period between 1-5 minutes is also granted once the timer starts
blinking. The timeout may occur anytime within those 5 minutes.

Once a file has timed out, it can be re-assigned from the History tab and
re-submitted within the grace period, provided it is still available.
Online Editor

We provide an online editor where the transcription has to be done. The

Editor contains an audio player and a text editor where the transcript
can be typed. The audio player can be controlled by buttons or keyboard
shortcuts. The text editor is a fully featured text editor (similar to
Notepad or TextEdit). To transcribe, play the file for a few seconds and
then pause. Then type everything in the text box provided. Repeat the
process until all the audio has been transcribed. Leave a blank ____ for
portions where the audio is unclear and cannot be understood.

The most used shortcuts are Ctrl+P for toggle play (i.e., pause if audio
is playing and play if audio is paused) and Ctrl+O for skip backwards or
rewind. Memorize these shortcuts to use the Editor effectively. The
shortcuts are also customizable. The option is present in the dropdown
menu next to the timer in the Editor. The customizations are saved and
can also be reverted back to default settings later on if desired. We
recommend using the latest version of Google Chrome for the Editor as it
has some advanced audio functionalities. Any other HTML5 browser (eg.
Mozilla Firefox) can also be used.

On Google Chrome browser, dictation is also supported. You can dictate

instead of typing. It will save you around 60% of typing effort. Play the
file for 5 to 10 seconds, repeat whatever you hear and then edit out any
mistakes. The audio can also be amplified on Google Chrome, from the
dropdown menu next to the timer. It is very useful for files with low
volume.

Footpedal Setup Guide

A footpedal can also be used with the Editor by configuring it to emulate

a key combination for each pedal button. That key combination should be
one of the shortcuts of the Editor so that the desired action is
triggered. The play, pause and skip backward actions are mostly mapped to
pedal buttons. Your footpedal may already support emulating a key
combination. Please check the footpedal settings or search the internet
to see if it's supported. If not, then you can use a program to do the
emulation. Pedable is one such program for Windows. The following steps
are for Pedable.

Try the following steps on the practice files first.

Close the Editor if already open.

Download and install Pedable from
http://www.nch.com.au/footpedal/index.html.
Configure Pedable to send key combination for each footpedal button.
Set the right button to Ctrl+P.
Close ExpressScribe if it's running. Close/minimize all other windows
except your Browser and Pedable.
Press the right button on your footpedal. The print screen dialog
should show if it's working correctly.
Open the Editor and set the key combination for the left pedal to
Ctrl+O which is the default for skip backwards/rewind.

Your footpedal should now be set up to use the right pedal for play/pause
and left pedal for rewind if the above steps were followed correctly.

Screening

Report issues correctly in order to receive more work.

We may ask you to report any audio issues in an assignment in order to

determine the difficulty level of the file. These reports are checked by
our administrators who judge the difficulty level. We charge our
customers a higher rate for difficult files and also pay a higher rate to
our transcribers to compensate for the additional time and effort.
Therefore it is of utmost importance that any issues in a file are
identified as early as possible. Our goal is to allow only good quality
files with American speakers into our system and screening helps us do
that.

Our screening algorithm tracks your performance as a screener based on

your reports and it may affect the number of files available for
transcription in your account at any given time. If you are able to
identify the issues correctly over a period of time, there will be more
transcription files available to you. Otherwise only the files which have
been screened will be listed in your available files tab.

We also provide a Cancel Warning
customer cancelling the order is
difficult. We recommend that you
as to avoid the loss of time and
Best Practices
for such files as the likelihood of the
high in case the file is found to be
select other files for transcription so
effort.

Based on our experience, we recommend the following to keep your account

in good standing.

Always preview the file before selecting. Check the audio quality and
accents and select only if you are comfortable with it. Always pick the
easiest file.
 Do not select files which have audio issues or accented speakers. The
chances of low grades on such files is high because of the cognitive
bias.
Don't use a footpedal. Use the keyboard shortcuts in the editor
instead. It is far more flexible and powerful and also very useful in
reviews and proofreading.
Review your transcript once before submitting, at least for the first
10 files.
As per your own assessment, if you cannot score a minimum of 3 on any
assignment then cancel it instead of submitting.
Look for the major changes while checking the diffs. Minor changes
can be ignored.
Be extremely careful with the first 10 files. If you do not score
well in those files, transcription will be disabled and we will not be
able to do anything about that.