In 2021 the transcription industry grew by over 6%, the increase partially influenced by the demand of pandemic—as more multilingual, educational, and media content is consumed worldwide; accurate, qualitative transcription becomes of crucial importance to the end-user. That’s why, even though AI-powered transcription offers a fast, automated process, the technology is still inferior compared to human-made transcribing.
In particular, AI limitations include the reduced capability to accurately transcribe various accents and dialects. “As our work reality shifted into a remote one during the pandemic, it’s only natural the demand for quality transcriptions of online conferences, meetings, and other forms of remote communications formed,” claims Go Transcript CEO Mindaugas Čaplinskas. “However, it is quite difficult for an AI to capture the dialogue of few people speaking at the same time, or depict an exact word, pronounced with an accent.”
The only way to make AI’s transcription accurate is for it to be double-checked by a human or human-powered transcribing to be powering AI learning, therefore being a backbone of it. In both ways, the process is time-consuming.
Keeping in mind that AI can only perform well with very clear context and high-quality audio, the demand for human-powered transcription is growing, despite the automation. Illustrating the market dynamic, Go Transcript, one of the market’s leaders, grew by 30% in 2021, specializing specifically in human-powered transcribing.
“Most of our transcriptions are made for the education industry, where accuracy is mandatory,” continues Čaplinskas. “AI’s top accuracy of 90% is insufficient—professional solutions start at least at 98%.” Overall, transcription services are most often used by legal, medical, and educational sectors – all of which require precision. Such exactness is valued, expressed by the company’s rate of 47% returning first-time users.
“The average revenue per buyer increased by 41% since 2019,” claims the expert. “The change might be attributed to the COVID-19 and the way it shifted our work and leisure environments. Multilingual content is on rise, as more and more popular pieces come up.”
Subtitling and captioning market over the next five years will see an annual growth rate of 8% in terms of revenue and therefore reach the size of 340 million USD by 2025. GoTranscript also notices the growth, confirming that the amount of foreign content translations has gone up by 20 % during the past year.
To sum it up, for natural, native-sounding content, human-powered transcribing solutions prevail as a go-to choice—especially as content consumers prefer high-quality transcriptions where no detail is missed, or accuracy is mandatory. Nonetheless, as AI is still dependent on learning on human-made transcriptions, the industry will still continuously grow.