I want to order a transcript. Where do I start?
Placing an order with CastingWords is as easy as 1-2-3!
1. Choose your product
Turnaround
We have three basic transcription products, differentiated by turnaround time:
1-Day Transcription Service puts a transcript in your hands in 24 hours or less.
1-Week Transcription Service is the same great transcript, with a one-week turnaround.
Budget Transcription Service is an ideal choice if you have a lot of material and aren’t as pressed for time. It’s perfect for research projects, or transcribing back catalogs of audio or video recordings.
Please note that the turnaround guarantees on the 1-Day and 1-Week products apply to high-quality audio up to one hour in length (per file). Difficult audio, or files over 60 minutes in length, may take additional time.
Including the Difficult Audio upgrade on challenging material does not reinstate the turnaround guarantee, but it does assure the smoothest possible turnaround, often to within the desired timeframe, by automatically increasing the pay to our workers who handling your project.
Upgrades
We have four optional upgrades, that may be applied, on a per file basis, to any of the above products:
To apply an upgrade to a specific file, simply click the corresponding checkbox.
The CastingWords upload interface: Provide info such as title and names, choose upgrades, apply tags.
2. Upload/provide your recording
There are lots of ways to provide your audio or video file to us.
You can of course upload it directly from your computer or device. Click the “Select Audio” button to browse for your file.
If your material is posted online, for instance on YouTube or Vimeo, you can click the URL tab and enter the link; our system will fetch the file for you.
If you store your files on Dropbox, use our Dropbox tool and select your audio and video files with the click of a button.
Zapier users can set up a Zap.
If you have a lot of material to submit, FTP may be the tool for you.
For truly seamless integration, check out our API.
Once we have your file, you can specify additional details if you wish, such as a title or speaker names (separated by commas). Add a note to the trancsribers if you want to provide additional context info, resource links, etc.
We also have a number of predefined tags you can click, if relevant, to help categorize your file in our system. This helps match your project to the most suitable workers.
Detail of the CastingWords checkout screen, showing the Estimated Durations and Exact Durations options.
3. Check out
Depending on how you provided your material, our system may be able to determine your file durations right away. If so, they will be filled in automatically.
If we can’t tell the duration before processing, your files may show a default duration of 1 minute. You can update the duration manually (rounding to the nearest minute) to get an accurate cost estimate.
Our default checkout mode is “Estimated Durations.” This means that, if you are paying by credit card (or if you are a postpay customer), you can place the order without updating or double-checking the file lengths; we will process the files, then calculate your exact cost based on the true duration of each file. You are billed upon completion.
If you check out with PayPal, the charge is processed immediately, so you need to make sure that the file durations are correct (rounded to the nearest minute), and select “Exact Durations” to let us know that you have done so.
If there is a discrepancy between the durations shown at checkout, and the true duration of your file(s), we will put your file on hold and contact you before proceeding.
(While the Exact Durations option is required for PayPal orders, credit card and postpay customers are of course welcome to use it as well!)
If you do not already have an account in our system, you will be prompted to create one at checkout. Doing so is as simple as providing your name, email, and state (if in the US), and selecting a password.
Head on over to the CastingWords store if you’re ready to get started, or shoot us an email at support@castingwords.com if you have any questions.