SurveyCTO’s new AI-powered translation and transcription features provide robust support for work that historically demanded heavy manual lift
Primary data collection presents unique challenges for on-site teams, researchers, and frontline workers. One of the most significant challenges comes from language barriers. High-quality research often involves teams working in regions where they do not speak the dominant language. While many teams prepare for multilingual data collection by focusing on involving locals to design their survey instruments, the downstream, post-collection needs are just as important: Translating responses into a language that is understood by organizational stakeholders is often a time-consuming but necessary part of data cleaning and processing.
Another closely related challenge many researchers deal with is transcribing audio data, whether from qualitative interviews or audio audit checks. Like translations, transcribing is a critical but resource-intensive process.
At SurveyCTO, we approach data collection challenges through the lens of principle-driven innovation, where every new feature or solution truly improves how data is collected and managed.
When it comes to translation and transcription, we leveraged AI technology to provide native solutions that significantly reduce the labor, time, and costs that go into manual transcription and translation, while maintaining high standards of quality and incorporating human oversight into the process.
Let’s dive into the details.
Table of Contents
Accelerate downstream data work and quicken time to impact
Teams that translate and/or transcribe form responses often follow a workflow that looks something like this:
- Collect data
- Export responses when data collection is complete
- Clean data
- Translate text and/or transcribe audio into text as needed
- Use transformed data in quality assurance, data analysis, or reporting
Step #4—translating text and transcribing audio—has historically required a lot of time and resources from teams, who need to incorporate third-party firms or software, or at the very least, involve an individual’s time for transforming the data into usable or understandable formats. These limits may have prevented teams from scaling projects that captured audio or multiple languages—or even prevented them from collecting data in these valuable formats to begin with.
These constraints are exactly what SurveyCTO’s AI-powered translation and transcription functionality is built to address.
One of the strengths of AI is its ability to quickly analyze and/or translate text. By transcribing audio data or translating text from one language to another with AI, teams can dramatically speed up work and reduce costs. In addition, teams can also scale QA, data analysis, or process improvement workflows by having access to transformed text data that AI is uniquely designed to leverage.
Scalability and speed are only the start of the benefits! There are many ways more ways this new functionality can help:
- You decide when you want to perform translation and translation work: either automatically as new submissions come in, or only for a subset of data within a specific time range.
- Transcribing audio submissions as they come in means identifying potential problems faster.
- You can eliminate the need for outside tools or services for transcriptions and translations, keeping more of your workflows and costs within SurveyCTO.
- If you utilize our transcription features, you can now take advantage of the full range of granular insights that come from audio data, without needing to actually invest lots of time manually listening to recordings.
- Options for building with SurveyCTO are greater than ever! Create more sophisticated QA and data analysis workflows that rely on audio audits or work with other languages without constraints, accelerating how you scale projects to new locations and global teams.
Next, we’ll cover how it all works within SurveyCTO.
Translating and transcribing in SurveyCTO: Everything you need to know
Our built-in translation and transcription functionality is designed to fit smoothly into existing workflows. In other words, you can activate and use this feature from within the SurveyCTO platform, which allows you to reduce dependence on external tools and translate and transcribe data as soon as it has been collected—even while data collection is still ongoing.
To create the most seamless user experience, our AI-powered translations and transcriptions use AI credits, which are a new unit of consumption we’re introducing with this release.
We’ll explore both areas below.
Usage options
Users have many options when it comes to translating and transcribing responses: Doing so automatically or manually, for new incoming submissions or existing submissions, using our API for bulk processing, and doing so across your entire server, in specific teams or forms, or for specific submissions.
- Automatic processing for new submissions: Auto-transcribe audio files, or translate new submissions into a different language, as submissions are received.
For this option, you can specify whether auto-processing should run for new submissions across an entire server, for new submissions in all forms within a particular team, or for new submissions within one form.
2. Manual processing for existing submissions: You set rules for translating or transcribing existing responses.
This can be done in bulk for submissions across your entire server, for submissions in specific forms, or for singular responses.
Want to translate or transcribe responses only within a certain time frame? That can be done, too.
3. API processing: You can also use SurveyCTO’s API to perform translation and transcription work more systematically across one or more forms.
This option is beneficial for teams with a large number of forms for translation and/or transcription needed for bulk processing.
Users can also see processing activity for each form over time to monitor historical and ongoing work.
Watch the video above to learn more about how our AI-powered translation and transcription features work.
A new consumption unit: Introducing AI credits
These features mark an exciting step forward in our AI roadmap. The ability to translate and transcribe collected data not only makes a significant difference in the way organizations operate at scale, but represents the first of myriad ways that AI can be leveraged within SurveyCTO to improve the quality, security, and impact of data collected on our platform.
These new features also drove the need for introducing a new unit of consumption at SurveyCTO: AI credits.
Many platforms today that offer AI functionality do so via the use of AI credits as a way to provide and charge for AI offerings. We have adopted the concept of AI credits for SurveyCTO as well in anticipation of an exciting roadmap of AI features beyond translation and transcription.
There are many ways for users to purchase AI credits:
- Your subscription plan – Each plan comes with a monthly AI credit allowance.
- Prepaid credits – You can prepay for AI credits.
- On-demand credits – You can also set a spending limit such that if the credits from your monthly plan allowance or prepaid packages run out, ongoing work using translation and transcription features won’t be interrupted.
Learn more about purchasing AI credits.
Looking ahead: Using AI in post-data collection processing
While our new translation and transcription capabilities represent a major leap forward, they are just the first step in bringing the full power of AI post-processing to the SurveyCTO platform.
In the coming months, we will be introducing AI fields functionality to unlock entirely new workflows, including:
- Even more ways for users to perform, store, and export translation and transcription work
- Sentiment analysis, summarization, and other tools for structuring qualitative responses
- AI-powered quality checks
- And much more!
We are excited to share more about this next evolution of SurveyCTO soon.
Start translating and transcribing with AI today
Manual translation and transcription have long been a bottleneck for teams working with audio data or collecting data in multiple languages. They typically required the help of third-party vendors, extra software, or hours of manual effort—sometimes keeping teams from collecting data in these formats at all.
SurveyCTO’s AI-powered translation and transcription is built to remove that barrier. By turning audio and multilingual responses into usable text quickly and at lower cost, teams can scale their projects and run QA, analysis, and process improvement on data that was once slow to work with.
It’s an exciting step forward in our AI journey, and we can’t wait to see what teams do with it.
Want to learn more? Check out these resources below:
