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AI-powered transcription engines are saving businesses a lot of time and money…when it comes to the English language.
Rev, Trint, and Sonix are among some of the more well-known of these engines. We have been very impressed with the quality of these engines when working into English, and they can be very useful for a few other languages as well!
However, there are drastic variations in the quality of these engines, especially when it comes to Asian languages.
We specialize in the transcription of Asian languages like Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and more. For this reason, we are constantly testing new transcription technology.
Recently, we decided to test out the quality of Korean language transcription using these engines.
We wanted to see if the quality of the AI-generated transcript was a) powerful enough that it could help our customers gain at least vague insights into the content of their audio b) accurate enough that a quick edit by our human transcription team could bring it up to publishable quality.
Unfortunately, the results of our test were not promising. It seems that as of 2020, the leading transcription engines on the market today have not yet been been trained on enough Korean language data.
Rev for Korean Transcription
Unfortunately, Rev does not offer Korean transcription.
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Trint for Korean Transcription
To test out the quality of Trint’s Korean transcription, we uploaded a podcast with excellent audio quality, discussing a very non-technical subject matter: everyday eating habits.
We sent the result to one of our Korean transcribers for editing, who returned the following comments. We later had two more transcibers confirm this evaluation:
“While several words were recognizable and one could guess at the content, the automatic transcription contained a fair amount of gibberish that was barely editable. The accuracy was not high enough to streamline the editing process. After attempting to edit, I found it easier to recreate the transcript from scratch.
The timecodes were also not reliable: my hope had been that I could at least rely on the timecodes to save myself time in editing.”
Below you can see an example of our transcriber’s edits, which you can see are extensive:
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Human Transcriber Edits Made to an Automatic Trint Korean Transcript
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Sonix for Korean Transcription
We then processed the same audio file in Sonix, to see if there is any difference.
Unfortunately, the result was very similar to the above Trint result.
In the Sonix case, our transcribers agreed that the result was uneditable, with incorrect timecodes and word splitting, an inability to recognize other languages (as with Trint).
While some sentences do emerge intact, the vast majority are misleading, or gibberish.
We chose not to attempt to edit it. If this had been a real transcription project, we would have re-transcribed it from scratch using human transcribers only.
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Are Korean Transcribers Afraid to Use Transcription Technology?
Far from it!
Our transcribers prefer to work with technology whenever they can: it saves them time and grunt work, allowing them to focus on the more fun part of transcription.
After all, they find little joy in creating timecodes and typing long strings of text! They much prefer researching the topics and the terminology, in order to ensure the highest accuracy of all proper nouns.
So when they prefer to transcribe from scratch, this sends a strong message.
The hunt continues: we will keep looking for a more accurate AI-powered transcription solution for Korean.
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Our Verdict: Can AI Transcription Services be Used for Korean?
We are always looking for ways to leverage technology for more efficiency and cost-savings.
However, while AI transcription services are very useful for English, and still very helpful for Indo-European languages like Spanish, French, German, or Russian, we do not currently find them to be adequate for languages like Korean.
We’re sure that Trint and Sonix will continue to optimize their technology, so we are still hopeful for the future!
In the meantime, the fastest and most affordable option for Korean is still to use human transcription.
However, we will keep testing the latest technologies and updating our partners about any developments.
If you know a Korean transcription software we should test, please let us know in the comments!
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How to Order Korean Transcription
Our team of Korean transcribers is now more than 60 strong! These experienced linguists work remotely from all over the world, in order to meet your rush needs.
Together we provide Korean transcription and annotation work to technology companies, media, law firms, and more.
Don’t hesitate to reach out for more information!
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I guess there hasn’t been as much demand for Korean transcription although I am sure there will be more in the future. Because of this lack of demand, the technology hasn’t been developed as well as it could be. For now, human transcribers will be used more than AI.
One way to improve transcription technology would be to simply give it more data. More human Korean speakers to give it more more examples on what spoken Korean sounds like. Providing voice-overs for companies that develop transcription technology is one idea for a job!