How to Set Yourself Up as an Audio Typist
If you’re thinking of working from home as a freelance audio typist, then there’s no need for any equipment. Your PC already has what you need probably.
What Equipment Do You Need?
- You’ll need speakers so you can hear the audio recording
- You’ll need to be able to play the audio recording
Most PCs will have this already. It is possible to use your usual PC speakers to listen and Windows Media Player to play the file.
However, once you try this, you’ll realise the shortcomings! I’d say that using your speakers and Windows Media Player probably slows you down to half speed, or worse! Most audio typing work is paid per audio minute, which means the faster you can type it up, the more you’re earning per hour!
As a rule of thumb, I earn £15-20/hour for straight forward audio transcription.
When I first started doing audio typing and calculating how much I’d earn per hour, the figures seemed to show I’d be on £6/hour at best! So I never bothered …. it was another 2-3 years before I found myself doing some more audio typing working from home and this time I was in a position to invest a bit of cash to buy myself some better kit. And immediately I realised how daft I’d been!
By using Windows Media Player and my speakers I was significantly reducing my hourly rate.
Here’s what I did:
- I downloaded some free audio software called Express Scribe. This is great because it enables you to alter the playback speed of the audio file. At full speed I was having to rewind and listen again quite a bit and with Windows Media Player there was no direct control over how far back I went, so it was taking me 10-20 seconds back at a time and on some recordings this was just very long-winded and frustrating as I had to listen through a whole sentence just to catch up to the bit where I’d got behind! Scribe has a slider control and you can instantly alter the playback speed to exactly match how fast you’re typing to the speed of the speaker. Scribe has some keyboard commands so you can use the keyboard, as you’re typing, to rewind a few seconds if you didn’t quite hear something; alternatively, the interface is just like any other online player and you have a slider you can drag and a pause/play button. There’s no learning curve with Scribe either. You load the audio file, then press the play button. And, it’s all free.
- Next, I bought a footpedal to plug into my PC. It was a plain, everyday, foot control which plugged into the USB drive of my PC. This enabled me to have much better control over the rewinding of the audio file when I misheard something. This saved me having to stop typing at all in most instances as I could simply press the foot control to rewind a few seconds, or as long as I wanted.
- All I needed next was a regular PC headset. Any headset would do, so I got a tiny earpiece.
So there it was, the complete kit that took me from earning £6/hour to £15-20/hour for doing audio typing work from home! It’s really made a massive difference because it took the job from being an arduous experience into a straight forward and easy way to earn money working from home.
Remember, you have to invest in yourself sometimes to get better results. By spending a few pounds I’m now doing the work in almost one third of the time, which means I’d be available to take on up to 3x the work! If the work’s taking you less time, you’re more likely to crack on and get it done too, it’s easier to fit into your available time.
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