Transcription - A Time-Saving Business Service.
Transcription - A Little History
The early dinosaurs of transcription were humans with a special talent for using shorthand for the dictation of correspondence, meeting reports and especially in the legal fields for court reports, depositions and trial notes. Originally, either Pitman or Gregg Shorthand was used to take dictation. It was transcribed by the secretary responsible for taking dictation.

A lot of things have changed in transcription since then. Court reporters are now chiefly responsible for taking court records and data on small machines. The data from these are later transcribed and become a matter of legal records. Stenography is rarely used in business offices of today.

Transcription - Contemporary Uses and Methods
Taking dictation is more likely to include a hand-held micro-cassette recorder that can be connected to a transcription machine. The updated versions of this in the medical field are office phones that are programmed to take medical dictation. It's transferred to a transcribing machine where in some cases, the voice-activated program produces a printed copy of the medical records. In law firms, transcription is still largely the domain of transcriptionists whose job it is to produce legal documents from tapes. The process is fairly simple. The transcriptionist takes dictation through earphones from tapes and transcribes it to a computer word-processing application that can be printed for future references.

Speech Recognition Transcription
With the advent of speech recognition as a technology for processing documents, the attempt to speak directly into a telephone and transfer this to a computer application that can transcribe the voice into an onscreen optical character recognition (OCR), has yet to reach the most useful levels. The reason for this is quite simple: Voices have a multitude of different inflections, timbres and pitches that can be misunderstood by the OCR application. Clearing the throat, as an example, can be read by the OCR application as a formal word. The other problem with this method that eludes technology is that only the most sophisticated and therefore, most expensive, Voice Recognition applications can familiarize with the user's voice, an essential part of the technology for OCR transcription.

Thus, the business world continues to rely on a transcriptionist to do the job of transcribing recorded documents. One interesting new feature of transcription is the use of DVD disks. Documentation is recorded on a DVD disk that is rewritable and sent out for transcription on a compatible transcription disk reader.