A speech media transcription system comprises a playback device arranged to play back speech delimited in segments. The system is programmed to provide, for a segment being transcribed, an adaptive estimate of the proportion of the segment that has not been transcribed by a transcriber. The device is arranged to play back that proportion of the segment, optionally after having already played back the entire segment. Additionally, a segmentation engine is arranged to divide speech media into a plurality of segments by identifying speech as such and using timing information but without using a machine conversion of the speech media into text or a representation of text.