Typing speed for transcription

People talk nearly four times as fast as the average typist types. Transcription is the craft of closing that gap without losing a word.

Take a 10-minute typing test

An hour of ordinary telephone conversation holds more than 11,000 words. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania who measured large collections of recorded phone calls found that speakers averaged close to 200 words a minute, with single conversations anywhere from about 110 to 290. A typist at 60 WPM, faster than most people, would need more than three hours just to type an hour of that once, before pausing, rewinding or checking a single name.

So an ordinary keyboard cannot keep up with conversation. Even 100 WPM, faster than about 99 typists in 100, is about half the speed of an average call. Transcription is stop-start work: listen to a few seconds, pause, type, go back, check. Rev, one of the large transcription companies, reckons that an hour of audio takes a professional two to three hours and an average person about four. Typing speed sets a floor under that time. Listening, accuracy and the style rules decide the rest.

Why accuracy matters more than speed

A transcript is only useful if it is right. A wrong name in an interview, a dropped “not” in a deposition or a misheard drug name in a medical record costs far more than the minutes saved by typing faster. That is why transcription companies test listening, grammar and their style rules rather than speed.

Speed still pays, just in a different place. Work at these companies is paid by the length of the audio, not by the hours you spend on it, so your typing speed decides what you earn per hour rather than whether you are taken on. TranscribeMe says as much: it does not hire on typing speed, but the faster you type, the more you can earn.

Here is roughly what speed is worth. On a 4,500-word transcript, typing at 70 WPM instead of 50 saves about 26 minutes of pure typing: 64 minutes instead of 90. Over a week of work that adds up. But it is only the typing. The listening, rewinding and checking take as long as they did before, and a fast transcript that breaks the rules is still a wrong one.

The style rules

This is the part beginners tend to underestimate. Rev's standard transcripts are lightly edited: filler words such as um and uh, stutters and false starts that the speaker quickly corrects are left out, while its verbatim option keeps them all. TranscribeMe offers clean verbatim, full verbatim and edited text. Each company also has rules for speaker labels, tags for sounds and unclear speech, numbers and timestamps. Learning one company's guide properly teaches you more about the job than another 10 WPM would.

What transcription companies test

Lists of the minimum typing speed at each company are easy to find on job blogs. They disagree with one another, and most of the figures do not appear on the companies' own pages. Here is what the companies themselves say.

TranscribeMe has no typing speed requirement. Every transcriptionist has to pass its general entrance exam first, and its specialist teams have their own: applicants for the legal team study the legal style guides and then take that team's exam. Its legal transcription page also asks for applicants aged 18 or over, with a computer running the latest Chrome, a stable internet connection and a PayPal account.

Rev asks applicants to choose a role and complete a short skills assessment that checks English and grammar. It publishes no speed cutoff, but its own practice guide says most transcriptionists type at around 50 WPM and recommends aiming for at least 60.

Medical transcription is a separate path. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says it usually starts with a postsecondary certificate, often from a programme of less than a year that covers anatomy, medical terminology, the legal side of health records, and English grammar and punctuation. Certification is optional: the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity offers the RHDS and CHDS credentials. Speech recognition now lets doctors record much of their own documentation, which turns more of the job into editing drafts, and the BLS expects the number of medical transcriptionists to fall over the coming decade.

Court reporting and captioning: a different skill

Court reporters and live captioners do keep up with speech, but not on an ordinary keyboard. Most write on a stenotype, a machine whose keys are pressed several at a time, in chords that stand for sounds, syllables, words or whole phrases. Others use voice writing: they repeat everything that is said into a steno mask, a hand-held mask with a microphone inside, and speech recognition software turns their voice into text.

The speeds are of a different order. Three of the National Court Reporters Association's certificates test the same three kinds of dictation at rising speeds:

The Registered Professional Reporter (RPR) tests last five minutes each and are passed at 95% accuracy, as are the merit tests. The association's captioning credential, the Certified Realtime Captioner (CRC), asks for 180 WPM on a five-minute literary test at 96% accuracy.

For comparison, 100 WPM on a normal keyboard is faster than about 99 typists in 100. The BLS says court reporters usually train through a certificate programme at a community college or technical institute, and many states require a licence or a professional certification. If live speed is what draws you to the work, this is the route to it, but it means learning a new machine and a new way of writing from the beginning, not pushing your keyboard speed higher.

Realistic targets

For general transcription, 60 WPM at 96% accuracy or better, on text with capitals and punctuation, is a sound target. It is the figure Rev itself suggests, it is faster than most people type, and above it the gains come mostly in hourly earnings rather than in being accepted. Below about 40 WPM the typing becomes the bottleneck: at 40 WPM, just typing the words of an hour of phone conversation takes almost five hours.

For legal and medical work, knowing the vocabulary matters as much as speed, and companies test it separately; TranscribeMe's legal team has its own exam. Check your typing speed against the average to see where you start.

How to practise

• Type real sentences. Transcripts are full of capitals, commas, apostrophes and question marks. Practise on the typing test with punctuation or a chapter of a classic book rather than on lists of common words.
• Build stamina. Work up to the 10-minute test and watch where your accuracy starts to slip.
• Practise listening, not just typing. Transcribe a few minutes of a talk or podcast that has a published transcript or captions, then compare the two word by word and sort your mistakes: misheard, misspelled, or punctuated differently. Each kind has a different fix.
• Read one style guide all the way through. Rev publishes its transcription style guide. Reading it shows you exactly what a company checks, from speaker labels to how to write numbers.
• Keep your hands on the keyboard. Pause and rewind with keyboard shortcuts or a foot pedal, so you never reach for the mouse in the middle of a sentence.
• Track the ratio that matters. Time yourself on a five-minute clip. Minutes of work per minute of audio is the number that shows whether you are getting better.

If accuracy is your weak point, how to improve typing accuracy shows how to find the mistakes you make most and fix them, and how to type faster covers the speed side.

Sources

• Yuan, Liberman and Cieri, “Towards an Integrated Understanding of Speaking Rate in Conversation”, Interspeech 2006.
• Rev, “How Long Does It Take to Transcribe One Hour of Audio or Video?”, “Practice Transcription & Improve Your Skills”, the freelancer application page, and Rev support, “Transcription Add-On Services” (standard and verbatim transcripts).
• TranscribeMe, “How to Become a Legal Transcriptionist at TranscribeMe” and “Transcript Formatting and Editing Styles”.
• National Court Reporters Association, certification pages for the Registered Skilled Reporter (RSR), Registered Professional Reporter (RPR), Registered Merit Reporter (RMR) and Certified Realtime Captioner (CRC).
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners; Medical Transcriptionists.
• Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, “Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes”, CHI 2018 (typing speed percentiles).