General Transcription For All Categories

General transcription is everyday transcription that is not legal, medical or technical - meetings, interviews, notes and personal recordings. The work is produced by people and not by software, and what shapes it here is audio, video and document material in almost any format, including legacy media, so the deliverable fits how you actually work instead of a generic template. Every file is checked by a second reviewer before it is sent.

Mostly individuals, small businesses and teams with one-off or occasional recordings. What they have in common is material that has to be exact and not roughly right, which is why every file is checked against the source before delivery. A lot of the work arrives from archives, estates and institutions digitising what they hold.

In the format your workflow already uses, with real styles and structure instead of flat text, so the file drops into your records without reformatting. Source material in almost any audio, video or document format is accepted, including formats most suppliers turn away. The format for general transcription is agreed at order stage, so the first delivery is the one you can file, send on or publish.

Single files are welcome, with no minimum order and a quote before you commit. None of that is left to chance on the day: it is confirmed at quoting stage. Anything on physical media is digitised first, logged, and then worked from the digital copy.

Worth asking for: audio in any common format can be uploaded or shared as a link. It is easier to set at order stage than to retrofit, and it costs nothing on top of the quoted rate when it is part of the original brief. A digital master of the source can be returned alongside the finished file where the original is fragile.

Yes, in 100+ languages, each handled by a native speaker and not by someone working from a dictionary. What general transcription involves does not change with the language, and the same independent check happens before delivery. Older recordings often mix languages, and each one is kept as it was spoken instead of flattened into one.

General transcription starts at $1 per audio minute and legal transcription at $2. General transcription is quoted from the material you send, so a short job and a long one are worked out the same way. The source format makes no difference to the rate; digitising legacy media appears as its own line in the quote. Quotes are calculated from how long the recording runs, how clear the audio is and how many people are speaking, so two clients sending comparable material pay the same, and nothing begins until you approve the written total.

The delivery date is agreed before work starts, and rush delivery within 2 to 24 hours covers anything urgent. Material sent at the end of your working day is in progress overnight. General transcription is scheduled against the people who actually do this work, not against a general pool. Legacy media such as tape, MiniDV, DAT or optical disc adds a digitising step, and that is quoted and scheduled up front.

The 99+% accuracy standard comes from human work plus an independent check: one transcriber produces the file, another verifies it line by line against the source. What gets checked on general transcription is the detail a reader would otherwise have to verify themselves: names, figures, terms and anything the source left ambiguous. That second pass is what catches a mistyped name or a passage of crosstalk recorded as one speaker.

Files are handled under NDA, moved through encrypted transfer and seen only by the assigned team. Archive material is often the only copy in existence, so originals are logged, restricted and returned. General transcription often involves material people would not want circulated, so the file is closed to everyone except the pair working on it. They can also be deleted on an agreed schedule after delivery, with written confirmation.