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Expand Your Content Reach With Automated Audio-to-Text Conversion

Automated audio to text conversion has tremendous potential to expand content reach. It is time you tried out an audio transcription yourself. Keep reading.

Fatema Aliasgar

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Audio content is a very trusted and excellent information source. But just having a bunch of audio files won’t help. It is because not all are auditory learners. Everybody has their learning methodology. Some are visual learners; some like hearing and learning, while others like reading. It’s always a good idea to have a mix of all types of content presentations.

But one benefit of converting audio files to text is that the text can be manipulated, stored, transmitted, and even translated. Called audio transcription, it is the process of converting audio to text. The potential of reaching out to a large audience is immense in audio transcription. There are innumerable opportunities to create fresh content and new types of information with audio transcription.

Why are businesses using audio transcription to boost their business prospects?

Although it could be called a simple audio-to-text conversion process, it is not as easy as it might seem. Accuracy of information, quality of content generated, nuances captured, intonations, expressions of speech deciphered, and several other aspects of an audio message must be transcribed.

The quality of the conversion and transcription is of great importance. Else, it would just be a bunch of text files, disorganized, poorly worded, with even worse sentence structure, and unusable.

An audio file can be a lecture, audio track, podcast, speech, etc. These are only a few of the many types of audio files that get generated every day. Converting them into text files makes it easy to share and reuse content.

Businesses can immensely benefit from this. They can use converted text files for their internal processes and analytical needs. They need not assign someone to listen to a podcast – instead, a converted text file is all needed. Even better, if the text file is in a format that can be fed into analytical engines, the job becomes even easier.

Audio to text conversion also helps get text files of people with various accents. When the French speak English and vice-versa; when the Chinese speak English and vice-versa; when a westerner speaks an Indian language – all of these are situations when the pronunciations of the speakers might not be perfect.

They may not be understood over audio – if people listen to the audio. But with audio-to-text conversion, there is no room for misunderstanding.

Top 6 industries that can use automated audio-to-text conversion

The below-mentioned six industries can use automated audio-to-text conversion to expand their content reach.

1. Journalism and Mass Media

A journalist’s day-to-day routines might become hectic. They will need to quickly produce articles from their interactions with politicians, celebrities, sportspeople, scientists, common people, etc. They can use automated audio-to-text conversion to create articles in quick time.

The audio can be converted into text when they finish an interview. With some minor edits, the content is ready to be published. The content can be published online, on a bulletin board, or in an information resource.

Automated audio-to-text conversion allows a journalist to focus entirely on their interviews. They need not worry about taking notes or losing them. They can quickly move about and talk to people and record all of this audio, only to later get it converted to text. A journalist’s journal can thus be full of compelling stories based on more facts than fiction.

2. Video production

Automated audio-to-text conversion is required for video production. On YouTube alone, a billion and more hours’ worth of video is watched. Audio transcription is required for the video world to increase its accessibility and view-ability.

Video files need subtitles. Adding them manually is not only time-consuming but not scalable. It is also not the best use of the capabilities of a video creator. Audio-to-text converters can be used to create these subtitles and any textual content that has to go on a video.

3. Market research

By pooling in the wisdom of the crowds, agencies that do market research can use automated audio-to-text conversion. Interviews with questionnaires may not always yield responses over email. Personal interviews will always do. Market researchers may interview scores of people. This entire audio can be converted to text and put on the table for further analysis.

4. UX testing

Feedback is one of the key proponents of a UX design and research process. Feedback can be elicited by way of interviews done in person. The audio files can be later analyzed. UX researchers rely on feedback from various types of stakeholders of a system, including end-users.

5. Academic research

In an academic research project, not all research is structured. For example, the academic researcher may not always spend time in the library on an industrial automation project. The researcher will also spend time on the factory floor, interacting with factory floor supervisors, workers, machine operators, etc. All this interaction is critical data. There is no time to take down notes or write them down. It can only be recorded and later converted to text.

6. Medical

Interactions of doctors with patients can be recorded. These interactions serve many purposes. The doctor can refer to the interaction to refresh themselves on any initial diagnosis. They can also refer to the patient's interaction with other doctors.

Audio-to-text conversion comes in handy in all these situations. The converted interaction, available as text, also serves as a source of non-repudiation. When doctors have prescribed a course of medical action, the verbal exchanges cannot be repudiated. In turn, it increases the quality of medical healthcare delivery.

How can automated audio-to-text conversion expand your content reach?

Automating audio-to-text conversion can help you expand your content’s reach if you are a content creator.

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Reach a wider audience

An audio podcast may not be consumed as much as a podcast that has been converted to text. Those who listen intently and absorb all the information are less. It is because most people would rather read up on information. It is because textual information can be referred back. The reader can pause their reading. The reader can also go back a couple of paragraphs and start reading again. But in a recorded podcast, this is cumbersome.

Therefore, content creators, especially those who create podcasts, can also create textual versions of these podcasts. They can reach out to a wider audience by doing this. Their potential to allow their content to be consumed by a wider demographic is higher.

SEO boost

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Audio files are not very SEO friendly. Search engines were made to index textual content. Even if an audio file has metadata to describe its contents, search engines may only do that much. But with textual content, search engine bots have various algorithms to index the content. The algorithms determine the semantics of the content, categories, relevance, and the list simply goes on. So, it’s always a good idea to generate textual content from audio files to boost SEO.

Remodeling content

You can choose to keep audio content. But you can always remodel the converted audio in various ways. Remodeling transcribed audio content is presenting the textual content in multiple ways. For example, a podcast on a company's performance by the executives can be stored as an audio file. The audio file can be converted to text. The textual content can be remodeled into various types of content pieces.

Blog posts

The blog post is an informal version. A financial performance podcast, if blogged about, can be discussed informally. The blog is an information resource, but the type of language used is informal and interactive. Blog posts are an easy way to connect with readers. They tend to consume blog post content faster and recall them better.

Infographics

Podcasts or any audio content cannot have infographics. So how do the listeners visualize the speech or the discussions in the audio? Readers get a better perspective by converting audio to text and later adding infographics. Infographics developed of transcribed audio are an example of content remodeling, and are used by corporates to communicate their organizational aspects.

Email campaigns

Audio files converted to text and subsequently curated to be sent over an email is a powerful messaging tool. Especially if all of this is automated, it can create numerous opportunities for instant email marketing campaigns, reducing the time to act or react and improving conversion prospects. Email marketers use audio-to-text conversions to get to their audiences faster. Email campaigns created as and when events unfurl are an excellent way to get into people's minds in a world where getting the attention of a choice-laden consumer is the topmost priority.