How long transcription takes, and what makes it take longer

The standard turnaround

Our standard turnaround is two to three days.

The clock starts when we have the file and the instructions, not when the enquiry arrives. If a recording has to be re-sent because it was corrupted, or if we are waiting on a decision about formatting or speaker names, that time sits before the clock rather than inside it.

Two to three days is a working commitment rather than a marketing figure. It is set by how long careful review takes, which is the subject of the rest of this page.

Where the time actually goes

Intake and audio check. Before anything is transcribed, someone listens to the recording to establish what it is: how many speakers, how clear, whether any section will need particular attention. This is when problems get found, and it is the point at which we tell you if a file will take longer than expected.

Draft. Either a transcriptionist types from the audio, or a machine produces a first version that a transcriptionist then works from, depending on the tier.

First review pass. A reviewer goes back through the transcript against the recording. Not reading it, listening to it. This is where misheard words, wrong speaker attributions and missed passages are caught.

Second pass. Consistency and house style: speaker labels used the same way throughout, terminology consistent, formatting conventions applied, inaudible tags placed correctly with timecodes.

Final formatting and delivery. The document is assembled to the specification you asked for and checked once more as a document rather than as a block of text.

The draft is the short part. Review is most of the elapsed time, and it is the part you are paying for.

What extends a turnaround

Difficult audio, more than anything else. A recording with crosstalk, background noise or poor microphone placement can take several times longer to review than a clean recording of the same length, because passages have to be replayed repeatedly.

The number of speakers. Attribution is work in its own right. A four-person panel is more than twice the effort of a two-person interview.

Specialist vocabulary that has to be verified rather than guessed at. Drug names, case citations, technical standards and proper nouns get checked, and checking takes time.

Length. A very long recording is not simply a longer job. Reviewer attention is finite, and quality in the sixth hour is not the same as quality in the first, so long files are broken up and paced rather than run straight through.

Planning a deadline

Send the recording as soon as it exists, rather than when the deadline approaches. Files move through a queue, and arriving early often costs you nothing and buys you slack.

Tell us the deadline when you ask for the quote. We will say plainly whether it is achievable. We would rather decline a date than accept it and miss it.

If a file is genuinely urgent, say so at the outset. Priority handling can be arranged before work starts. It cannot usefully be applied halfway through, once a file is already in review.

Where a project has several recordings, tell us the order you need them in. Delivering the one you need first, first, costs nothing. Reordering after we have started does.

Why we do not promise same-day as standard

We could deliver faster by reducing the number of review passes. That is the only lever, and pulling it changes what you receive.

We take a deliberately limited volume of work so that senior reviewers touch every transcript. Three transcriptionists with more than fifty years of combined experience between them can only be in one place at a time, and we would rather that constraint show up in our turnaround than in our transcripts.

Urgent work is possible and we do it. It is arranged for a specific file with a specific deadline, priced accordingly, and agreed before it starts. What we do not do is advertise a turnaround we could only meet by skipping the review the rate is for.