Video Transcription of your Virtual Meetings During the Global Pandemic


One thing that businesses agree upon in every industry is the importance of meetings and conference calls. However, because of the recent events “Covid 19”, meeting rooms have become partially empty and the shift is now focused on virtual meetings in respect of social distancing regulations. In order to make use of this strategy effectively, video transcription is the ideal method to ensure the same qualitative results.

Businesses usually meet up regularly to make sure communication across all boards is met. Meetings can vary to develop skills, boost employees' morale, leadership, and most importantly, decision-making. For the latter, a particular employee is always in charge of writing meeting minutes during the actual gathering in order to keep an actual record of the things agreed upon. These meeting minutes are then re-edited and sent to all employees to be informed of new changes, decisions, and tasks… 

This practice has been performed for many years yet it hasn't quite been efficient in many ways. First, the person in charge of meeting minutes must acquire incredible listening skills to be able to focus on both the meeting and writing down the report. The second aspect is the lengthy time frame to re-edit and send back to people to review. Last but not least the quality of these reports is usually shallow as they miss other content and focus on the outcome only. 

Now that meetings are done virtually, the struggle to write down meeting minutes is multiplied as many side issues can happen. Thankfully, most virtual meeting applications offer a feature to record the meeting for later use. This function can help in report making, yet it also requires time and energy. 

Now that you have a recorded version of your meeting, if you do not have access to a video transcription tool that can do the transition automatically, then you’ll definitely be stuck for hours trying to rewind the meeting recording and write down important notions. 

Therefore, video transcription of meetings should be extremely considered. Since people often lose track of what was said during board meetings because of the excessive time frame and information provided, video transcription is a key solution in this case. It can provide transcriptions of the whole meeting in a matter of seconds. 

Recent studies have shown that people are having 8 meetings per week across all company sizes. These recent statistics were in fact held before the pandemic. Since most people are now working from home, the absence of face-to-face meetings resulted in an increase in virtual meetings and conference calls to balance out the workload and make sure everyone is on top of their tasks.

With this number of meetings, we can predict the amount of information transmitted and the challenge to keep track of what happened in each one. This reinforces the idea of having a video transcription to ease the recording and archiving process. 

                                           

Benefits of Recording and Video Transcription of Meetings During A Pandemic 

As we have discussed before, the rise of remote working during the global pandemic has contributed to an increase in virtual meetings. Few businesses have noticed a decline in effective communication and decided to opt for digital recordings of meetings. 

Meeting Recording Can Capture the Team’s Interactions

During face-to-face meetings and using the old techniques of writing down meeting minutes, most team interactions are not taken into account as they should be. Meeting minutes were only prepared to include meeting results and tasks to be done and reviewed for the next meeting. Important interactions or ideas rarely make it to the final report. 

Recording the entire meeting has definitely a positive impact in regards to content quality. Since the recording will encompass the entire meeting, every aspect will be taken into consideration; from important results, participants’ intervention, visual content ( in case of any), and so on. The recording can then be accessed by people who haven’t had the chance to attend due to unknown reasons. 

With video transcription, people can also access the written version of the recording. The transcription will be helpful for people with special needs within the business to also be informed. It can also serve as a backup medium for the video.

Recording Training Sessions for Optimum Results

Now that most businesses have been operating from home, training sessions can be tricky sometimes for both parties; the instructor and the trainees. Remote trainees can become distracted throughout the session. They can also face technical difficulties and therefore tend to miss out on important notions. 

Recording the session and using video transcription software can help trainees review the session at a later time. The recording and transcription material will also be useful to assess the overall performance. It can also serve as a feedback medium to better enhance the content and better use of materials. 

Data Retention and Backup Policies

Having backups within a business is always a good idea. As much as recorded content is useful, videos can’t be trusted. Therefore, you should always make sure you have a hard copy of your material and a backup transcription for future use. Using a video transcription to transform your video recording into a written transcription can help with asset organization and storage. 

Digital files and recordings can easily get corrupted and for a business, this can be the most dangerous act ever. Your meetings; which contain your company’s secrets, goals, and aspirations can be hacked if accessed by undesired people. Therefore, instead of counting on your recordings only, it’s better to keep a transcription version just in case. 

Steps to Follow for Video Transcription of Your Virtual Meetings 

Transcribing is one of the easiest tasks to tackle if you have the proper tools. Before AI technology was popular and efficient, people used to transcribe their materials manually. The process of manually transcribing videos and audio was lengthy and tiring. It usually takes longer and costs a lot more based on the material’s length. 

AI technology came to help people work smart, not hard. Businesses should aim at working efficiently in order to deliver high standard content. Therefore, even within the business itself, meetings can be tackled differently. Investing in good-quality video transcription software can be an alternative to meeting minutes. The person in charge will have more time to engage in the meeting as opposed to focusing on writing down the content. 

The process of transcribing meetings using video transcription software is quite simple. The first aspect you need to make sure you do is to enable camera recording during your meetings. It is important to record the meeting from start to finish if you intend on having transcriptions of the whole video. It is advised to inform all participants that the meeting will be recorded to avoid any side talks or unnecessary information. 

The second step is the video transcription process. Since you have a video format for your meeting, it’s best to invest in video transcription tools that support imported videos. You can upload your meeting video to the software and generate transcriptions. Most tools will ask you to generate subtitles first and based on that it can generate transcriptions. Other tools will allow you to make modifications in case you need to change your transcription content. 

All that’s left is to download your transcriptions. The latter are usually downloaded in a Wordpad or Notepad format and they include line number, time range, and text. 

Once the file is downloaded, you can then send it to all meeting participants as a backup material or archive it for future use.