As a first step in our research project on technologically-aided transcription methods, the research team reviewed 27 different technologically aided transcription methods.

Due to our purposes and those of the NEH grant, we needed to fulfill two major criteria:

1. It needed to work with both Spanish and English
2. It needed be sustainable, meaning it was open-source or free to us at our institutions.

Of the 27 transcription methods reviewed, 21 had the ability to work with both Spanish and English (light blue, second column). However, only six (6) of these were sustainable (light blue, third column).

Out of these six (6) options, two (2) created an automatic transcription draft after you uploaded the audio or video data (pink, auto, fourth column). Two (2) more required that the audio is played on speakers or re-voiced (spoken) into the microphone (green, re-voicing, fourth column). I'm sure we're all familiar with this on text to chat phone features and now with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc. Then, two (2) were the manual technologically aided transcription methods that have been used for quite some time in research involving transcriptions. (These aid in slowing down transcriptions, using foot pedals, repeating segments certain times, etc.)

We chose to test one of each of these three types of technologically aided transcription methods: auto-generated, re-voicing, and manual. We chose Microsoft Stream instead of Youtube due to concerns about data. For the other categories, we chose SpeechNotes and ExpressScribe due to some additional features and user-friendliness.

In future posts, we will outline the process for testing these methods, as well as our findings.