by Alex Russell
In the doldrums of interview transcription, and still almost six hours of audio left to go.
It’s amazing how much time it takes to transcribe interviews. Audio transcription is a profession, I know, and even with great interviews and a very interesting subject, it’s a struggle for me, a non-pro, to get through it. After the first hour of audio took me almost three hours to transcribe—time evaporates while doing this kind of work—I looked at Craigslist to see how much the pros charge. Even at $60 an hour it’s tempting to hire it out, looking at the 6,000-word file I’ve got so far, knowing how much more there is to transcribe. But I’m a writer, and therefore would rather spend my money on other things, like coffee and pizza and books.
Being that we’re squarely in the future, a historical moment when we’ll soon have flying cars crashing all over the place, I figured there must be speech-to-text translating software that could do a fair job. There must be. And there kind of is.
I found at download.com Better Wave to Text, a free-trial software that can be used in conjunction with voice training to turn microphone dictation into text. It can also be used to convert audio files into text, but it requires voice training. That means I’d have to play the recording through the program and correct the text for a while before it starts to get the words right. But what about the parts of the interviews even I have trouble understanding what my subject is saying? What about the parts where I can’t understand my own words? That could turn out to be a lot of voice training, not to mention installing the software and trying to figure out how to use it—time wasted if it doesn’t work right after all.
One way or another, for this project I’ll have to go back through these interviews, and it won’t hurt me to do it in the transcription process. This whole dream of a way out of transcribing the interviews myself was just a break from the work, a small avoidance of sorts, which of course is exactly all this blog post was when I got started, and will be up to the moment I post. At that point, I think I have a couple phone calls to make. There must be somebody home with nothing else to do, or at least some transcription of their own.
I know what that feels like. I get the same blues when i have to edit. My ex-wife was a whiz at transcribing and got a zillion (fabrication) jobs doing it.
Keep on trucking.
today: the scene was ina coffee shop a large video screen mounted on high, the door open, foggy day in SF. Soccer game in England on video. Player injured other players rush over to help. You can hear him moaning and calling on players.”Don’t! backoff! leave me alone!
woman outside stops. Looks around. Where is that voice coming from. Finally the voice stops ith a big groan as they lift him to a stretcher. She listens, hears nothing and walks off.
To tell who of an incident on California Street? A story here?