The Technology Pipeline

Given our obsession with process to ensure our clients have consistent quality and turnaround times, eDecree has always leveraged technology to drive our processes. From standardized templates for all our clients and an online portal for clients to track their jobs, to transcript automation to provide competitively priced services and a better work experience for our typists, we believe technology assisted transcription is where we excel.

People + Technology is bigger and better than People or Technology alone.

Transcript Automation Our journey with transcript automation started at eDecree’s birth in 2006. We realized very early on that creating well-defined processes and leveraging technology to turn these processes into well-oiled systems would be critical to operations. While production of transcripts appears to be a very bespoke and manual activity, it can easily be broken down into steps: creating typing guidelines and templates for each client, receiving transcript orders, typing, auditing & releasing the transcript.

We turned this pipeline into a system, with staff and technology working together to provide our clients with the best experience in the transcription industry. Technology does what it does best: the repetitive and cumbersome tasks. Staff focuses on producing the best finished transcript by applying their judgment and attention to detail to each document they produce. The best of both worlds.

In August 2021, we partnered with Loom Analytics to deploy their Transcript Automation product, which combines speech-to-text, text post-processing and document automation, to provide our typists with a fully set up first draft transcript that they apply their editing skills to, by listening to the audio, fixing any errors and applying their experienced judgment to every single transcript. This is delivered by Loom Analytics as part of a full client portal solution that is used by eDecree for an online client user experience.

Speech-to-Text has been a part of eDecree’s processes for the past eight years, starting with custom-trained models for our insurance clients’ letter and report dictation. Given that most of our services focus on multi-speaker audio processing, we continued to experiment with different speech-to-text services to process conversational audio with varying accents, languages, interpreters and background noise. Our decision to partner with Loom Analytics was driven by the ability of their product to support our complex audio and transcript formatting requirements.

Client Portal Clients have the option of submitting and tracking their jobs through our client portal where they can create a job, upload audios to it, and provide supporting information for the production of the transcripts. They can also track the status of the jobs and download transcripts as they become available.

Media-sync’ed transcripts Clients using our portal have the ability to open their rough draft transcripts sync’ed to their media (audio/video) files, so that they can click on any part of the rough draft transcript and jump to that point in the media and vice versa.

Templates All our transcripts are produced on standard templates driven by client samples. They are embedded with hotkey driven macros to ensure that the layout and common notations are consistent across all transcripts. It also allows our staff to be focused on the accuracy of the spoken word instead of being distracted by the setup of the document.