Robots are giving us our jobs back

There’s an ongoing battle in today’s workplace between creativity and efficiency. Workers struggle to complete administrative chores, leaving even less time to finish the enjoyable creative jobs they’re most passionate about. Take journalism, for instance: people often choose this career path to craft stories that will capture and educate an audience. Yet journalists spend an average of 6 hours a week transcribing audio, slowing down the reporting process and leaving little time to express creativity. Over the course of a year this adds up to two business months. That’s almost two months of every year that journalists spend transcribing when they could be getting stories out faster, producing more content and finding new, creative approaches to their work.

However, following advances in artificial intelligence (AI) the media industry can now turn its attention back to the creative tasks at hand. Through the use of AI, journalists can now automate the repetitive, day-to-day jobs. In fact, research from Adobe suggests 31% of enterprises will use AI by April 2019, and further research indicates that robot input and computer automation will help to reduce the working week to just four days.

One technology that’s already helping to achieve this is automated speech recognition (ASR). Speech-to-text technology and ASR have overhauled how audio and video files are converted to text, making a new and innovative kind of automated transcription service.

AI transcription interprets the sounds that make up human speech and produces a text transcript, saving hours of labour through manually transcribing. When each word in these transcripts is stitched to the audio/video and combined with a word processor, producing an interactive transcript, the process of correcting transcripts is also streamlined. Straightforward tasks like note-taking no longer eat into workers’ time. Instead, they can use their hours on the clock doing what they're good at and tasks they actually enjoy.

AI transcription removes the grunt work of lots of professions and allows people to flex their creative muscles, producing work that's more interesting and enriching. That means video editors have more time to perfect videos, journalists can source more interviews or refine a story's angle and educators can give students more effective educational tools.

And it’s not just these industries reaping the rewards of automation. AI technology can significantly benefit all sorts of industries. Think of highly trained lawyers who have to verify hours of transcription before editing and filing – they haven’t spent years studying law to take notes, and the good news is with AI transcription they don’t have to. The same goes for professionals in

academic research, user experience, government and more. Lots of industries will find that automation from AI can give them hours of time back.

The evidence speaks for itself – AI is bettering the way we work. With more time on hand, employees across industries can focus their time and efforts on creative pursuits. No matter how good the robots get, they’ll never be able to replace a human’s creativity or innovation. But by swapping out mundane, repetitive tasks for time that can be invested in more creative and strategic ways, technology lets professionals leverage their innovation to advance business objectives. AI transcription puts the power of time back into the user’s hand, helping them to focus on the jobs they enjoy, boosting productivity and putting satisfaction back into jobs.

AI is giving us our jobs back.