Reduct Transcription Guidelines - Background audio and sounds

Grammatical rules

Common errors

False sentence starts

Filler words and phrases

Inaudible material and crosstalk

Numbers

Stutters and repetitions

Background audio and sounds

Commas

Inverted commas

Dashes/Hyphen

Proper nouns

Long pauses

Background audio and sounds

Police radio

For police audio recordings, any communication from the police radio—such as giving instructions to the driver—should be transcribed under a separate speaker label.

In the example given below, Speaker 1 is a police officer speaking over the radio, and Speaker 3 is a car's GPS voice assistant.

Example

Speaker 1: Red BMW, on Highway 2, copy.

Speaker 2: Where is it heading? Copy.

Speaker 1: Greenland Park, northwest-bound. Copy.

Speaker 3: Go straight for six miles and turn right on Greenpark Avenue.

Voice command assistant

You can use a separate speaker label for transcribing automated voice command assistants like Google Home Mini, Siri or Alexa.

Example

Speaker 1: Alexa, play God’s Country by Blake Shelton.

Speaker 2: Playing God’s Country by Blake Shelton.

In this example, the smart assistant Alexa is responding to the prompt and is labeled as speaker 2.

However, avoid transcribing songs that’s being played in the background.
Avoid transcribing advertisements that are unrelated to the content.