Being an esoteric author is a decent way to make a living. But like all of these things, the volume of material produced is king. And writing is hard.
The easiest way to do this is to channel your information and make an audio recording of that information. This also comes in handy if you are giving a seminar and you have students that want a written copy of what went on.
The first part is easy. Get a recording device with a decent microphone and press record. Being in a quiet place without a lot of background noise is helpful as well.
The next part is getting what you’ve said onto paper.
And that is where things can get expensive.
For my personal seminars, I am now using a transcription service called Sonix (www.sonix.ai). I’ve paid for professional quality transcription in the past and it gets expensive. $10-15USD for 15 minutes is very typical for entry level in that business. Sonix does it for $5/hr and, since it is automated, I can get an hour’s material back in the same day.
Also keep in mind that even when having another person do this by hand, due to the nature of the material, I frequently have to hand edit everything when it comes back. And that does not include the fact that it can take days to get the material back from the transcriber.
With an automated system like Sonix, that is not an issue. The system is fairly easy to use as well. Basically, you download your file, upload it to their system and it sends an email to your working address when the file is ready. Fairly painless.
Doing this I can process roughly 8-10 hours of audio in a day. It even provides a headline for different speakers.
It is a nice program that I can recommend to anyone regardless of their level of proficiency with software usage.
This is the first product endorsement I’ve given on the blog and will not be giving many more.
But…if you need a transcription service, I can recommend Sonix (www.sonix.ai).
