Express Scribe is a flexible and versatile audio and video playback tool designed to help typists to produce written transcriptions of audio recordings. The program can be controlled easily through a foot pedal or a set of fully customizable hot-keys, and it comes with an interesting set of tools to help transcribers manage their recordings and texts in a more efficient way.
Far from being a simplistic audio player, Express Scribe is a full-featured transcription manager that will allow you to tailor to your needs and personal skills the way the audio recordings are played back, as well as how to pause, stop, or resume the recordings. Likewise, it offers you specific tools to manage any new incoming recording as well as the way transcriptions are sent to their recipients. Thus, you can set up a “hot folder” that will control any new recording sent to your transcription service, as well as define which of the nearly 100 video and audio formats supported will be downloaded automatically from the hot folder. In order to help your listening skills, you can improve the quality of the dictation file making use of the simple noise reduction filters available.
Playback can be controlled with a variety of foot pedals (AltoEdge, VEC, Vpedal, etc.) or with a set of convenient hot-keys that you can easily customize. You can also set bookmarks on any audio file to help you go back to apparently unintelligible or hard-to-grasp passages in a fast and simple way. Alternatively, you can also jump to specific times within the recording if you happen to know where to find that elusive word or phrase. However, when everything fails (or simply to speed up your production rate) you can rely on the program’s speech recognition tool. This “speech to text” option will transcribe the audio for you trying to leave as little room for fine-tuning as possible.
You are given the possibility to add written notes to your speech recordings as an excellent way of documenting your work on the fly. You can also choose to have the video stream displayed or not when playing back a video file (reading the speaker’s lips can be of great help sometimes to check misheard words) or rely only on its soundtrack. Finally, I don’t want to leave unmentioned the neat word and line counter that will let you know right away the true length of your work, and therefore its commercial value.
To help you manage your finished transcriptions, Express Scribe comes with a helpful dispatch utility that will allow you to attach your work to an e-mail – complete with the e-mail address, the body, and the subject – without having to leave the program. Clearly, Express Scribe is more than just an audio player for speech-to-text transcription – it is a fully-fledged software tool to manage all your transcription work, from the reception of the original audio or video files to the dispatch of the final text.
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