In an ideal world, all conference calls hold perfect attendance, and everyone hops in not a minute late. However, that’s not the case for most organizations.
With real-time transcription, attendees can fully engage in presentations and webinars regardless of their hearing capabilities. The content can be disseminated globally, eliminating communication hiccups and breaking down barriers.
It Breaks Down Barriers
If you’ve zoned out during a conference call or missed a critical point at a presentation, you know that auditory content can be hard to process. But with real-time transcription like those offered by Agora.io, participants can view the audio and a live transcript on their screens.
It allows them to read what they’re missing, which improves focus and increases retention. It also helps to cater to various learning styles, including those who learn better visually or have hearing impairments.
Additionally, real-time transcription can be paired with instant translation to cater to a multilingual audience. For example, when a company hosts an online product launch with a global audience, journalists from Beijing and bloggers in Madrid can follow the proceedings through instant, on-demand translation.
This capability is essential for business leaders to build an environment conducive to productive discussions and increase their reach. It empowers accessibility, preserves knowledge and insights, unlocks new potential for growth, ensures compliance, and enhances audience engagement.
It’s even an effective tool for customer support teams that rely on call transcripts to identify keywords, highlight moments of confusion or frustration, and inform future decisions.
It Caters to a Multilingual Audience
When paired with translation services, real-time transcription is a valuable tool for attendees who aren’t native speakers. Attendees can choose their preferred language and instantly see the content transcribed.
This eliminates the need for interpreters and ensures everyone understands what’s being discussed. However, this process has some drawbacks regarding latency — the delay between what was said and when the transcription shows up on the screen.
Humans can easily detect even a few milliseconds of lag, which makes the event seem disjointed and rushed. This is why automated transcription software uses speech-to-text algorithms to reduce the chance of error and deliver transcripts seamlessly and consistently.
Transcripts also provide attendees with an effective means of note-taking and can help facilitate learning retention by clarifying concepts, reinforcing understanding, and encouraging thorough notes. They can also be helpful for anyone unable to attend the meeting for one reason or another.
It Aids Accountability and Reference
You know the importance of real-time transcription if you’ve zoned out during a lecture or missed a crucial point in a conference. Adding text can help attendees focus and retain information, including those who learn better visually or have hearing difficulties. It also helps those who attend meetings, webinars, or seminars take accurate notes for future reference.
This is especially important if those events include discussions about patented technology or other confidential company information. Transcription can bridge linguistic gaps for a multinational audience with instant translation services. Imagine a CEO delivering a product announcement to global journalists and bloggers at an event.
A transcription in English can be instantly translated into Mandarin, Spanish, or French so that the audience understands the message. In addition, real-time transcription can help companies stay compliant with Sections 504 and 508 Disability Compliance standards by making their content accessible to all users. It can even be used as evidence for legal proceedings. By turning live audio into transcripts as they occur, transcription makes communication more inclusive and seamless for everyone.
It Improves Focus
Unlike automated transcription software, which uses speech recognition models to convert audio to text, human transcribers listen live and transcribe in real-time.
They use the draft text as a reference, fixing speaker identification and punctuation errors while adding context and capturing emotion, tones, accents, and other vocal details. They can even help with vocabulary and pronunciation issues.
This lets teams focus on meeting objectives and ensures all members can access critical points later, reducing misunderstandings or disputes during follow-up meetings.
Additionally, transcripts provide an accurate record that can be used to facilitate a more productive and inclusive discussion for those who cannot attend in person due to scheduling or other reasons. Some offer live transcription for meetings to support more equitable messaging for remote and deaf/hard-of-hearing attendees.
This helps people who cannot join in person to participate better and contribute during meetings and lectures by enabling them to search and read through the complete text of the conversation. This saves them time, effort, and frustration while providing them with a tool they can rely on for ongoing access to the content of their meetings.
It Saves Time
When you broadcast a live program or presentation, you want to ensure everyone is paying attention and fully engaged.
This can be difficult to accomplish if the audio needs to be more explicit or distractions are getting in the way of total concentration. Real-time transcription helps to address these concerns by allowing you to create a written record of the conversation as it is taking place.
This can be particularly useful for professionals taking notes during calls. For example, doctors can quickly transcribe patient encounters to save time and increase productivity.
Market researchers can quickly transcribe interviews to help them analyze data, and legal services professionals can rely on this technology to make information retrieval quicker.
Traditional transcription involves converting audio or video recordings into written text after the fact, which can take time. With real-time transcription, the resulting transcript is displayed simultaneously during the event, making it available to a broader audience in a shorter period. This is possible because of advanced speech recognition technology or translation algorithms that automatically transcribe spoken content.
