Why opting for transcription tools for your meetings?
Why opting for transcription tools for your meetings?
In the professional environment, meetings are key moments with lots of exchanges and information. And this, in a period often tight, or even timed. Thus, the professional must be able to present, reinforce his ideas, while taking notes and commenting on the work of his colleagues. As a result, note taking can quickly become difficult. Therefore, opting for automatic speech transcription tools is recommended and increasingly popular during meetings. Let’s explain the process here.
Professional meetings: human note taking
For starters, it is important to remember what professional meetings are and why note taking – both handwritten and computer – is complex and essential. In fact, a meeting is like gathering in one place, and at the same time, several people. Both in a room and remotely. Gathering around a session with more or less specific goals and often with a more or less determined ending time.
As a result, one may wonder why to organize a professional meeting. There are two schools: those who see the benefits of meetings and those who, on the contrary, do not recommend them, suggest avoiding meetings. We will explain here the usefulness of professional meetings.
In general, there are three major types of meetings – with different objectives. The first type of meeting is the informative meeting. This type of meeting aims at sharing important information to its participants and/or retrieving information from the employees.
Types of meetings to transcribe
During an informative meeting for example, you can stocktaking, discuss a business strategy, you can keep with your colleagues’ progress.
Then, there are some meetings that promote exchange. Communication in meetings is put forward and this improves team cohesion. By organizing this type of meeting, you will be able to listen to everyone’s opinion and enrich each other. For example, we often do brainstorming, in order to find new ideas together.
Finally, there are also so-called decision-making meetings. This type of meeting validates together a decision for all. For example, for new hires in the long term. The organizer can also set up a decision-making meeting in order to solve a specific problem. Each participant will propose a solution.
This is the reason why the human professional faces many difficulties in taking notes and then transcribing a meeting intelligibly. As well because it depends on the type of meeting but also because in itself the exercise is difficult. Indeed, it is necessary not only to be prepared for a meeting but also actively participate and correctly take « manually » notes.
Here are some difficulties and disadvantages that this exercise involves:
- The presence of multiple speakers
- Bad understandings
- A time-consuming approach
- The speed of the meeting …
Therefore, one must be aware of these constraints and be able to take them into account.
Perform an effective note taking
In fact, in order to make an effective note taking in a meeting, you have to follow a few rules, before, during and after.
In the first place, you should ideally be able to learn upstream about the topic of the meeting. Then prepare for your handwritten notes, a margin to the right of your sheets to add your remarks or personal questions. In addition, your positioning in the room will impact on your listening and understanding. And we also advise you to determine in advance what will be the end use of your notes and that you write on an abbreviated way to go faster. As we show you with the example above.
Secondly, D-Day, it’s about not losing the thread while noting the most important! In fact, you do not need to write down every detail, only a summary of the speakers’ comments. Above all, write down the key elements that are difficult to remember without notes – such as numbers, dates, names. Pay attention to technical words and sentences. Note the plan of the discussions.
And at last, after the meeting, do not wait very long to reread yourself and fill in the blanks of your notes. Make the necessary corrections immediately and rewrite the passages that are difficult to read. A few days later, make a synthesis and organize your notes to find the overall meaning and make proper minutes.
Audio transcription of meetings
As you can see, many parameters come into play for an effective meeting and note taking, humanly speaking. So, another solution will be to record the meeting. The support on which to rely will be in the form of audio, soundtrack. It will be transformed into text. This includes some subtleties.
In fact, when a meeting is transcribed, there are several technical and understanding parameters to consider. In addition, there are three levels of transcriptions for meetings: in full, redesigned or in synthesis. In the frequent case of full transcription, the remarks made during the meeting are transcribed exhaustively. The problem is that, certainly it is complete, but not always very intelligible, with repetitions etc.
In the case of a rewritten transcript, the transcribed words are adapted to the written word. For example, hesitations, redundancies, syntax mistakes are removed in order to get a smooth and easy reading of the meeting text. The reformulation is subtle because it is about keeping the essence of the meeting. For the summary transcription, the content of the meeting’s speech is summarized, it keeps just the essence of the messages and the speakers.
Transcribed meetings: expert tools
The transcription of meetings – or any other oral exchange – requires some expertise. Indeed, it must be understood that a good transcription begins above all with a quality recording. Without a good audio at the start, it will be very difficult to transcribe later. Thus, we recommend using good recording tools, such as the professional audio recording tool, Nagra.
Nagra is a recognized brand of professional portable sound recorders. This brand was created in 1950 by a Swiss engineer of Polish origin, Stefan Kudelski. The word « nagra » means « saves » in Polish. Today, Nagra digital recorders with their accessories, allow quality professional recordings. And a quality recording is equivalent to an almost perfect transcription!
Automatic transcription for your meetings: a necessary expertise
Lastly, you will understand, to be certain to make the most of your meetings, that the human, and the technologies are essential. Thus, despite intelligent note taking and new automatic transcription systems, expert and skilled human intervention is also needed. For example for the layout and corrections. It is important to always re-read transcripts, for meetings and in general.
Transcription with proofreading
The Authôt application allows you to automatically transcribe your word. That is to say to automatically convert the audios of your meetings into texts. In addition, we also offer an automatic transcription service with proofreading. With the possibility to give informations to the correctors, for a better layout and any specific words … it allows a reliability and a quality always sharper! In addition, the automatic transcription makes it possible to halve the time and cost of manual transcription while perfectly meeting the constraints imposed.
Automatic transcription in meetings is today a considerable gain of time and quality. But for optimal quality we advise you to call on experts, both in terms of tools and human skills. Do not hesitate to contact Authôt to benefit from our expertise on this subject!
Authôt. You speak. We write.