Streaming Speech-to-Text technology (also known as live transcription) converts real-time audio streams into accurate text. From live sporting events to conference calls, live transcription makes interactions more engaging and accessible for everyone.
Industries including financial services, health care, customer support, and market research are using Streaming Speech-to-Text to drive engagement, improve accessibility, and generate immediate insights.
Below, we'll walk you through a handful of live transcription use cases we're seeing across industries. But first, let's quickly recap live transcription and why it matters.
What Is Live Transcription?
Live transcription is the process of converting spoken language into written text in real-time. Traditionally, humans would be responsible for listening to live content and typing it out (usually at a delay) as it happens. Now, artificial intelligence and machine learning empower speech-to-text solutions to automatically transcribe (and even translate) content in real-time with minimal human intervention.
Live transcription relies on a combination of advanced speech recognition and natural language processing. Here's a high-level overview of the process:
- Audio Capture: The audio input is captured through microphones or other recording devices.
- Speech Recognition: The audio is processed by a speech recognition solution that converts the spoken words into text.
- Real-Time Display: The transcribed text is displayed in real-time, with minimal latency, to let viewers follow along as the speech happens.
Live Transcription vs. Post-Event Transcription
While live and post-event transcription serve the same purposes, they do it in different ways:
- Timing: Live transcription happens in real-time during the event, while post-event transcription is done after the event has concluded.
- Accuracy: Post-event transcription can be more accurate since it allows for editing and correction, whereas live transcription prioritizes speed and may include minor errors.
- Usage: Live transcription is ideal for accessibility during live events, webinars, and meetings, providing immediate text for participants. Post-event transcription is used to create detailed, polished records for future reference, sharing, analytics, and archiving.
What Are the Benefits of Live Transcription?
While the end result of live transcription is simply written text, there's a lot you can do with a transcription versus only the audio recording. From improved accessibility to searchability and analytics, Streaming Speech-to-Text can help in several ways:
- Improved Accessibility: Makes spoken content accessible to individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing.
- Higher Engagement: Helps participants follow along (especially in noisy environments or speakers with strong accents).
- Better Record-Keeping: Offers an immediate and accurate record of spoken content—essential for meeting minutes, legal records, or educational notes.
- Greater Searchability: Lets users find specific information or topics for reviewing content, preparing summaries, and extracting key points
- Language Translation: Can be paired with translation services to provide real-time subtitles in different languages.
- Regulatory Compliance: Provides a verifiable record of interactions for accurate documentation.
- Analytics: Empowers advanced analytics by providing structured data, ready to be analyzed to extract insights, identify trends, and measure performance.
10 Real-World Live Transcription Use Cases
Live transcription is becoming faster, more reliable, and more accurate—and that's expanding the list of practical use cases. Let's take a look at how organizations are leveraging live transcription today.
1. Live Broadcasts
Live transcription in broadcasts creates on-screen subtitles or captions for viewers to follow. You'll see this for everything from live sporting events and concerts to social media live streams and even gaming streams.
During the event, these live transcriptions make the content more accessible and easy to follow (especially for those who prefer to read content). Following the live event, the transcribed content helps create searchable archives.
2. Virtual Meetings and Conferences
Everything from team meetings and company all-hands to virtual conferences or hybrid events can benefit from live transcription. This could be creating real-time captions to follow along with or even on-display transcriptions on a digital screen during an in-person event.
You can even pair your transcription services with translation tools to provide real-time subtitles in multiple languages. Participants can focus more on the discussion rather than taking notes—because high-quality streaming speech-to-text models are part of a broader AI platform that can distinguish between speakers, summarize meetings, and even highlight takeaways and action items.
3. Customer Service and Support
Live transcription supports customer service agents and callers by providing real-time text of customer interactions. This allows for immediate analysis, documentation, and follow-up—it can even alert managers and higher-ups if they might need to hop on a call to help or intervene.
The live transcriptions can be stored for documentation, reference, or analysis following the interactions. You can use these learnings to power agent training and learn which strategies work (or don't).
4. Education and Online Learning
Schools, colleges, and online learning programs can use live transcription services to provide accurate and timely notes. It can help with lectures, seminars, interactive sessions, and workshops.
Students can focus on understanding and participating in the lesson rather than frantically taking notes. Transcripts can be reviewed later for better retention. Transcription can also be integrated with more interactive tools to let students highlight, comment, and discuss specific parts of a lesson.
5. Legal Proceedings
Live transcription in legal proceedings provides real-time text conversion of courtroom discussions, depositions, and other legal activities. This provides accurate and immediate records of documentation, legal accuracy, and accountability.
Layers, judges, and jurors can use live transcription services to better follow conversations in real time. Some attorneys can speak quickly—having a transcription helps everyone stay on the same page. Journalists can also use live transcriptions to get instant access to accurate quotes and proceedings to use in timely articles without waiting for official post-event documentation.
6. Health care and Telemedicine
Healthcare organizations and telemedicine can use live transcription to convert spoken medical consultations, patient interactions, and clinical discussions into real-time text. This is especially important for increasingly prevalent virtual care when sound quality and accents could lead to misunderstandings or miscommunication.
Creating accurate, real-time documentation of medical consultations reduces the risk of errors in patient records. It also gives all patients instant access to important medical information.
Administrative roles can also use live transcription to streamline transcribing medical conversations, allowing them to focus more on patient care and less on scribbling notes.
7. Financial Services
The financial services industry can use live transcription for client meetings, investment briefings, and earnings calls. This improves transparency, compliance, and accessibility.
These live transcriptions provide accurate records for immediate review and analysis. It keeps all interactions documented accurately for searchable records and potential auditing.
8. Government and Public Sector
Government organizations can use live transcription for in-person meetings, public hearings, press conferences, town halls, and other official events. This makes all the proceedings more accessible to your community and creates accurate, searchable records for documentation and historical archiving.
9. Market Research and Focus Groups
Market research organizations use live transcription for real-time discussions, interviews, and focus groups. Having instant access to these transcriptions allows for immediate consumer insights, trends, and preferences analysis. It also lets you ask more relevant follow-up questions rather than collecting and gleaning all the insights post-discussion when your group is no longer accessible.
Automated transcription reduces human error and also lets your team stay engaged in the conversation rather than note-taking. Following the interviews, researchers can quickly compile large volumes of data from multiple focus groups for more extensive analysis.
10. AI-Powered Live Assistants
AI-powered live assistants change how we interact with technology and access information in real-time. They combine live transcription and natural language processing with text-to-speech systems to provide immediate, accurate responses to user inputs and questions.
For example, during live events or meetings, AI-powered live assistants can transcribe spoken words into text and then process that text to generate relevant answers, summaries, or follow-up questions.
In customer service, AI-powered live assistants can handle multiple queries simultaneously to provide real-time support and free up human agents for more complex tasks. The integration of live transcription with AI allows these assistants to understand context, detect sentiment, and offer personalized interactions.
Build Live Transcription Solutions with an AI Partner
Integrating live transcription into your products, services, events, and experiences doesn't need to require heavy upfront investments or vast technical resources—you just need the right partner.
Look for advanced speech-to-text solutions that provide unmatched accuracy, scalability, and reliability:
- High Accuracy: Achieve near-human level transcription accuracy with state-of-the-art models (even with poor audio conditions like noisy backgrounds).
- Scalability: Handle large volumes of audio and video data seamlessly, whether it's for small teams or large enterprises.
- User-Friendly API: An API that is simple to integrate, letting you quickly start transcribing and analyzing audio data.
Test our API in minutes in our Playground and see how easy it is to transcribe and analyze audio in real time. Ready to start building? Sign up for a free account to access speech-to-text and audio intelligence models to transcribe up to 100 hours of audio the free Speech-to-Text (and more) plan.
