Artificial Intelligence vs. Human Intelligence

Posted on 24th August 2023 • Categories: General

Artificial intelligence would never be able to fully replace human intelligence, well we hope not anyway, as it would be a very scary scenario if it can.  Suddenly the 1970’s film, “The Stepford Wives” springs to mind!

Even though transcriptionists may have observed a decrease in enquiries, there are still many industries that heavily rely on humans to produce accurate transcription.

I’m hearing the words “artificial intelligence”, or as it’s mainly known as, “AI” every day now, and as it could be beneficial in some areas, accurate transcription is not one of them.  It’s perfect if you want to draft a quick letter or an email, you can just talk, the document gets typed for you and then you can do a quick proofread, edit it where it has not understood your dialect, or misspelt “their” for “there” and you’re sorted.  But that’s not the case for all transcription.  Imagine receiving a legal document that you have been asked to sign, would you trust it?  No, my thoughts exactly.

With AI, the task of producing accurate transcriptions of actual human conversation remains beyond the abilities of even today’s most advanced software.

After researching this subject, I have found that even with the most advanced AI transcription software available, it has only demonstrated an accuracy rate of around 85%, but greater accuracy is essential in areas such as the legal industry, as errors can have significant consequences.

Trained human transcriptionists possess cognitive abilities that surpass artificial intelligence, enabling them to understand speech context and dialects, enhancing transcription accuracy.  Using AI will create further work of proofreading for inaccuracies and this process can become more time-consuming and incur extra costs.