Once a company has decided to go with a third party audio typing service provider in order to meet their transcription needs, the next step would be to start looking for prospective service companies who will be chosen to do the work.
Now, it is not a stretch to say that there are hundreds of companies out there that provide audio typing services and finding the ones that suit your needs is not an easy thing to do.
As a matter of fact, the person or team tasked with this might simply give up on this whole outsourcing business and return to in house audio typing.
One factor that could make a big difference and cut down the searching effort time in half is deciding what kind of pricing model would suit your needs.
There two main types of pricing model that audio typing services go with and each pricing model based on certain criteria.
It is not to say that these are the only type of pricing structure that is followed across all the players of the audio transcription industry.
Pricing Models As a matter of fact, no one actually uses the basic pricing models discussed here verbatim.
They would modify it to suit individual requirements, but most of the pricing models that are finally penned in, eventually have to start by either the fixed model of pricing or the variable pricing model.
We need to understand the basis for any kind of billing in any industry.
We are speaking about the audio transcription industry here, so what is the main work in this industry? The work involved is to convert given audio data into printed and documented words.
There are obviously some challenges when it comes to converting audio data.
Challenges And Cost Factors The challenges include but not limited to audio recording quality, accent of the speaker or speakers involved and finally the format of the input data as well as output data.
The problem with audio recording is that a lot of times, companies use poor or ineffective recording equipment.
Sometimes the recording equipment could be state of the art but is implemented and placed poorly in the recording room.
In even more strange but not entirely unrealistic situations, the conversation could be taking place in a room or surroundings filled with a whole lot of noise.
Then there are issues with the speakers themselves.
Some of them may have an odd sentence pronunciation or there could simply be too many speakers speaking at the same time.
Group discussions can get extremely unintelligible because in many cases the person who is closest to the mike has his words recorded clearly while the person on the far end of the room would have his voice recorded with less clarity.
A very closely related issue to the speakers is the terminology.
Sometimes the recorded words are too technical and a variety of terminology might be used in the discussions.
Finally there are problems associated with audio formats and what kind of formats the company wants the data to be audio typed.
Each and every challenge that we just discussed, will either drive up the cost or reduce the overall billing.
For instance, if the company used efficient recording methodologies then the audio would be recorded with crystal clear quality and this will allow less time to be spent by the transcription agent on each recording without having to do multiple passes.
Similarly, if the speakers use less of the terminology then the agent need not be trained as such.
However, if the discussions are heavy on specific terminology then the cost would go up because the agent would have to be trained to understand the employed terminals.
In contrast these cost driving factors the audio and output document formats aren't that big of a deal because of innovations in technology that have made audio formats challenges irrelevant.