What is the difference between Result Review and a Difficult Audio surcharge?

In this article we clarify the differences between our Result Review service and Difficult Audio surcharges. 

Our Result Review service focuses on reviewing and adjusting the Captioning results generated by CaptionSync. It is recommended for highly sweetened content (music, noise, sound-effects, poor quality, interference), and/or when a user uploads their own transcript and it is not formatted/marked correctly. So Result Review happens after the initial captioning results are generated, and it is only applicable to Captioning submissions (Captioning-Only, or Transcription-Captioning requests).

A Difficult Audio surcharge is related to the Transcription process, and is only relevant when we are transcribing audio content with poor intelligibility. Note that this is different from noisy audio, as a recording may be noisy, but perfectly intelligible; likewise, a recording may have little noise, but have poor intelligibility due to accent or mic positioning. A Difficult Audio surcharge is assessed when a recording has such poor intelligibility that it will take a skilled transcriber additional time to extract a transcript. So a Difficult Audio surcharge happens before the results are generated, and it is only about the Transcription portion of the submission. It is only applicable to submissions where you requested us to create a verbatim transcript of the audio content (Transcription-Only, Production transcript, or Transcription-Captioning requests).

A few things to note about a Difficult Audio assessment and surcharge:

• It is used very sparingly; our transcribers are able to handle most of the audio we receive without having to categorize it as a "Difficult Audio." This is just a tool to help us address those very challenging requests that will take a great deal of extra time to obtain a transcript.

• If our transcribers cannot make out the audio without special efforts, then your viewers are undoubtedly having similar problems; we would not expect to see difficult audio for studio-produced material -- this is more likely to occur in situations where you cannot control the recording conditions.

• The costs of a Difficult Audio surcharge are available on the Main price sheet, in your account.

• A Difficult Audio surcharge assessment results in a notice back to the user that such an assessment has been made -- you always have the ability to accept or decline it. If the assessment is declined, the submission is rejected and there are no charges for it.