Innovative Ways To Use Transcriptions In Your Business With Jason Chicola

Welcome to this edition of the Real Fast Results podcast! 
Joining us today is the CEO of Rev.com, Jason Chicola.  This
is a service that is highly recommended by many successful business
professionals.  Many of the people who follow Real
Fast Results are content creators of one form or another, and it's
a good practice to use transcribed content in your business, in
general.  That's because these help people to
leverage their time effectively.  In this interview, Jason
brings forth insights on how to use transcription services in your
business.  Jason, welcome to the show... Our promise is really
simple.  We transcribe audio for $1 per minute, we return it
within 24 hours, and the accuracy is 99% or higher.  That's
it.  It's that simple.  I can give you more detail on all
of that, but we want transcription to be really simple. If you go
out and look into the market, you'll find people that make it
complicated.  They will charge you based on how many speakers
you have.  They'll charge you extra if you want it in less
than 24 hours.  They will give you all kinds of up-charges if
you want to have different formats.  We do none of that. 
We have a flat price of $1 per minute, no if, ands, or buts, and I
think we are the only place that you'll get that. How To Use
Transcriptions in Your Business There are probably a dozen
different reasons, that are common, of why people would want a
transcript.  Media is a big industry that is producing
writing.  So, whether you are a writer, a podcaster, a
consultant, or a coach, if you are regularly trying to take
conversations or discussions and turn them into either insights or
deliverables, you need a transcription.  You're
probably taking notes and writing things down on your own. 
All of those people need it, and other industries need it too
(market research, legal, etc.) but the value is really in the time
savings. If you're currently taking notes and writing things out,
ask yourself how long it takes.  An untrained person would
probably take 10 minutes to type out one minute of audio. 
So ask yourself, "What is my time worth?"  That's the
calculation you have to do.  Our transcripts are $1 a
minute, so a 30-minute file, we'll transcribe for $30.  It may
take you 300 minutes.  If your time is valuable, you're
probably better off just going with us. We have customers that use
transcription for all kinds of reasons.  Many of them are in
the media, which means that they are producing deliverables (i.e.
Books that they've sold, eBooks, blog posts, etc.)  We have a
number of clients that have a small stable of writers that they use
for the second step of taking a transcription and editing it so
that it's more readable.  It all depends on what you're trying
to create.  I could think of one company, that's a large
customer of ours, that produces books for people.  If you want
to write a book, they will help, kind of, ghost write it for you.
They get audio from their clients, they turn it into a transcript,
and somebody else turns it into a book. To be specific
about this, if you are regularly producing content like this, you
may want to go to a place like Upwork to find a writer who fits
your style.  The reason I think it's hard to give a
general purpose answer is that everyone has a different definition
of what good looks like, or what the writer looks like, and so you
have to find the style, the writer that works for you. Innovative
Uses of Transcription I'll give you a couple of examples.  We
see an enormous amount of use around video.  Think about how
much video is being captured, created, and shared around the world
today.  One of our customers, called Heavybit, produces video
and they use our transcripts for a couple of things.  If you
go to their website and you watch one of their videos, it will be
captioned.  So, you can see their words on the screen in real
time.  There will be an article next to the video. 
So, if you don't feel like watching a 20-minute video, you
can scan the article and decide if it's your cup of tea.
Another thing you can do, if you're reading an article and you're
in the 20th paragraph, and you see a sentence that really intrigues
you, and they seem to be talking about something that's in the
video, you can click the text of the article and the video will
jump to the right position.  Basically, we call that
"interactive transcript".  We've actually built some
software to let anyone with a video make their transcript
interactive.  That means, the video links to the text
and the text links back to the video; it's a two-way street. 
It's not publicly released, but it will be out there, and we'll
make that free to all of our customers. Think back to when you were
in college.  Wouldn't it have been cool if you had transcripts
of all your lectures?  Now, the risk is you might not have
gone to class.  Okay?  But, if you were cramming for a
test, and you had to think back, "What did the professor talk
about, mitosis or meiosis?"  If you managed to have a search
box to find it, the text and the video would be together. So, I
think everything with video, there's a lot going there. I
mentioned earlier, a different trend is the example of people using
the transcriptions to produce books.  That's a big
deal.  We've had some famous authors that probably don't want
us to announce what they are doing, but famous authors using us.
Typically, it's their production company that's using us, and this
is typically more in the world of non-fiction.  I think that's
a big trend. There's another big trend that we're seeing around a
new category of market research, which is called "usability
research". There are many companies out there building the
apps that are on your phone. What they do is they get random people
on the Internet to use these apps, and as people use them, they
have them talk about their experience. "Why did you click that
button?  What do you think will happen if you click this
button?"  They'll have people, in some cases, not very
successful, and in some cases getting confused, but they will
record the reactions of "normal people", and then the people that
build the app listen to the videos. And, this is being done on a
large scale, and a bunch of those videos are running through us.
There are a lot of companies using video/audio recording
transcripts to do their focus groups.  Think of the
focus groups back in the 50's, where they put them behind the
dual-pane glass.  Well, the focus groups are moving to the
Internet, and it's moving to video and transcripts that are linked
together. I have to remark, Lynda.com is one of our favorite
customers.  They use us to caption all of their content. 
I think that it's probably worth noting at this juncture that we
offer two related services: transcription for people who have more
dialog and captions for people who have videos where they want
their words displayed on the screen.  It's another matter of
the details, but if you put it on a video, you want captions.
There are probably four or five different reasons why
someone making an educational course or video would want
captions.  The most obvious one is that you might
have a listener that's hard of hearing, but there are many
others.  It helps the recall, and it helps their education to
be able to see the words from the screen.  Most businesses
have some customers who speak English as a second language. 
Many people, who are parents with young children, will find that
they can turn the video down when their kid goes to sleep and just
read the captions.  Most people in America use captions now
and then, and only a very small percentage is hard of hearing. In
education, having a text is transformative. We transcribe.  We
don't produce the recordings; we receive them.  My point was
that there are many companies that are getting regular people to
use their products.  They are recording audio or video and
sending it to us.  So, we don't provide the audience; we just
provide the transcription, but it's a whole burgeoning new
industry.  I know of 10 companies that are doing it at some
level, and two or three are doing it to scale. A Key Tip For Using
a Transcription Service Like Rev Clear audio.  I can't tell
you how many times we get a recording that was done at a Starbucks
with banging stuff in the background, and then they wonder why
there are mistakes.  "Garbage in, garbage out," but if you
record good audio, you'll get a great result.  I would predict
that within a decade, you're going to see speech recognition
playing a major role in this kind of work, and for speech
recognition to be effective, what you would want is individual
tracks.  That's going to help. Right now, I think the current
state of the art of recording is pretty poor because most people
are focused on mobility and convenience.  That is, "do it with
my phone," as opposed to quality.  I think it's going to be a
while before quality methods are used regularly. Connecting with
Jason If you go to our homepage, Rev.com, you'll see three
offerings: Transcription, Captions, and Translation.  We offer
them all today. Our Twitter handle is @Rev.  We have an iPhone
and Android app called the Rev Voice Recorder.  Go to your app
store and look up Rev.  The app lets you record and
transcribe.  It's very convenient. Real Fast Results Community
If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing
here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on
over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show,
download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome
thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share
those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As
always, go make results happen!