Waxy.org is the sandbox of After recording last week's interview, I was left with a 36-minute MP3 and a profound feeling of dread. You see, I hate transcribing audio. I used to transcribe interviews in high school, and it's always tedious, taking upwards of eight times the length of the clip itself.
Bracing for a good four or five hours of rewinding and writing and rewinding, I remembered that this is The Future! So, instead, I tossed the job over to the global anonymous workforce at Amazon Mechanical Turk instead.
The result: my 36-minute recording was transcribed while I slept, in less than three hours, for a grand total of $15.40.
This is a fraction of the cost/time of any other transcription service online, including the Turk-driven Casting Words, though you potentially sacrifice some quality. In my experience, though, there were virtually no errors.
Here's how to do it yourself, with no programming knowledge required. The instructions below are verbose, but using my template, it shouldn't take you more than five minutes of setup per job.
Step 1: Prepare your audio.
First, I split my 35-minute audio file into seven five-minute MP3s. Why? Mechanical Turk workers are all working in parallel, so the more discrete tasks, the faster the job gets done. This also diminishes the risk of one bad worker ruining your whole job. (Though you're always allowed to reject bad submissions, and you'll never have to pay for those.)
I used the open-source Audacity to split the files, but you could just as easily use any audio utility or editing software. Optionally, you might want to make each clip overlap by a few seconds, so you'll be able to easily recognize where each segment of the transcript starts and stops.
Name the files sequentially. In my case, they were interview_1.mp3 through interview_7.mp3. When you're done, upload the files somewhere they can be downloaded publicly. You'll need the full URLs later.
Step 2: Design your HIT template.
Mechanical Turk jobs are called HITs — short for the dystopic-sounding "Human Intelligence Tasks." After you've signed up as a new Requester on Mechanical Turk, you can design a new template from the homepage using one of several samples. Choose the Default Template.
On the Properties screen, we'll write a short description of the task, define how many people we want to work on it, and how much we're willing to pay them.
For a five-minute MP3, I think allotting two hours per assignment is ample time, and I expired the entire HIT in 12 hours because I was in a hurry. As for pay rate, you'll need to determine the "Reward per Assignment" based on the difficulty of the task and what you think is fair. I chose $2.00 per five-minute MP3, or about $0.40/minute. Depending on the difficulty, you might want to try going higher or lower.
I only wanted one worker to attempt each clip, so I changed the "number of assignments per HIT" to 1. (If you want redundant transcripts for each clip, change this to 2 or 3... But be aware your costs will double or triple!)
After entering all this information, here's what my finished Properties screen looked like:
On the Design Layout screen, you design the template that gets displayed to each worker, using basic variables that will be substituted later. For this template, we make up only one variable named "$url." You can call it anything you like.
The basics you'll need are a title, some simple rules, the link to the audio file with a substitution variable, and a text form for the worker to type the transcription into. If you'd like to use my template HTML, here it is. (Make sure you change the path to your own audio files!)
Two things to notice in my example. First, the "${url}" variables will be substituted with values in the "url" column of the spreadsheet we'll create in the next step. Second, any form element you create will end up in your final output from Mechanical Turk, so don't worry about the naming. I called mine simply "transcription." Here's what the relevant part looks like in the final template:
<a href="${url}">;${url}</a>
Enter your transcription below:
<textarea name="transcription" cols="80" rows="30"></textarea>
For the worker's convenience, I also added an embedded Flash player for the MP3, but this is entirely optional. When you're done designing your template, it should look something like this:
On the next screen, make sure it looks the way you like, and click "Preview and Finish" to save the HIT template.
Step 4: Upload the data for your HITs.
Once we're done designing our template, we can select it to create a new HIT batch. We'll be creating a simple comma-separated file (.CSV) filled with the data that will be substituted into our template.
On the Publish tab, select the template you just created by clicking the "Select" button:
Now, Amazon generates a sample CSV for you to put the URLs to your MP3s in. Click the link to "Download a sample input file" and open the downloaded CSV in a text editor. If you've done everything right, it should look like this:
Hit1_url_data
Hit2_url_data
Hit3_url_data
Replace the "Hit1_url_data" lines with the full URLs to your own MP3 files. For me, this looked something like:
http://waxy.org/temp/phonecall_1.mp3
http://waxy.org/temp/phonecall_2.mp3
http://waxy.org/temp/phonecall_3.mp3
And so on. Save the CSV file, and upload it to Amazon. When you're done, your uploaded file should appear, with the number of input lines.
Step 5: Publish your HITs.
Select your uploaded input file, and preview the finished batch of HITs. You'll be able to page through each HIT, seeing exactly what workers will see. Use this opportunity to test that your audio files can be downloaded and heard properly. If it all looks good, click "Next" to confirm and publish your batch. This is what the final screen looks like:
If you don't have any money in your Amazon Payments account, you'll be prompted to fund it with a credit card. After you've paid, click "Publish HITs" and you're done!
Your HITs will publish out to the Mechanical Turk workers, who will find and work on your task. Depending on the length and number of your MP3s, expect some work back within an hour.
As they're working, you can browse and approve the results. The final output is an exported CSV, a spreadsheet of all the finished work that can be opened in Excel for your review.
Conclusion
You'd be insane not to use this for your own transcription projects. Absolutely nothing else comes close in price and speed.
One thought: I suspect it'd get even faster if you split clips into more pieces. I'd bet that splitting into one-minute segments would reduce the time by at least half. I'll bet you'd be able to command lower rates with smaller MP3s too, since the time commitment would be lower, driving more competition for the tasks. If anyone experiments along these lines, please let me know!
5:24 PM
We used to use CastingWords for our sites (including Gamasutra.com) when they first started out. At that time, the service was pretty much straight using Mechanical Turk with not much in the way of post-editing.
It worked well a lot of the time, but sometimes you would get phonetically transcribed stuff that was just horribly painful - unless you were into beat poetry, I guess. Andy, I'm guessing you lucked onto the 'good' Turkers for this type of thing, and/or they've got better at filtering out the terrible ones - this was a good while ago.
However, CastingWords ended up raising their prices for well-edited stuff - they're still a lot cheaper than actual transcriptionists, mind you.
What we ended up doing, since we have a LOT of transcription, is just using two or three trusted game enthusiasts whom we pay a bit more than CastingWords minimum, but enjoy the subject matter we talk about. So it's our own community-sourced three-person MTurk, I guess.
I have used MTurk for transcribing articles, instead of OCR-ing, and that seems to work really well.
One great thing about MTurk is that people on it are used to HORRIBLY rote tasks, like identifying road markings (!), so anything like transcription of an interesting interview is actually exciting for them.
6:22 PM
CastingWords is a great business, and I definitely encourage people focused on quality to go for them.
For quick, dirty, and cheap transcription, MTurk worked out perfectly for me, but your mileage may vary. There's really no reason for a turker to deliberately perform badly, since they can get rejected (or blocked) and not get paid for their work... The longer the transcription, the greater the incentive to do it right.
7:15 PM
Oh my word. I recently paid upward of $300 to have somebody transcribe two hours of audio so that I wouldn't have to. (I hate transcription, too.) I'm bookmarking this for the future -- no question.
8:25 PM
Andy,
I routinely hire people off of craigslist to come to my studio and add keywords and metadata to photos that I'm planning on sending to my stock photography agency, and this seems like a really fantastic way to accomplish that same task. Do you know if it's possible for Mechanical Turk to write the input of what the workers are typing back into the same file you're sending them to transcribe? If I can figure out a way to set up AMT so that I can upload a series of images, and get them back a few hours later with embedded keywords, that would be, as they say, incredible.
9:51 PM
Hal,
Try setting up an MTurk HIT for someone to write a program to do what you want. Talk about self-replication!
Anyway, depending on how you attach the keywords to the files, there may be a tool like jhead (first hit on Google), which can modify EXIF and IPTC data, to help insert the keywords into the images.
10:52 PM
Hal: Mechanical Turk workers can do whatever you like, as long as it's relatively simple and doesn't require special software or identifying themselves.
I'm amazed how poorly documented this is, but I believe simply adding an HTML file upload (i.e. "<input type="file" name="myimage1">") will allow a turker to upload a file, and you'll be able to retrieve it. Somehow. I haven't tested this yet.
12:10 AM
I just tested two approaches using the new batch HIT builder interface for receiving file uploads, and neither worked. You can receive file uploads individually using the previous version of the Requester Site, but you sacrifice all the power of the HIT builder templating. Oh, well.
1:30 AM
Thanks for your suggestions guys... looks like I have a new project for myself!
I'll poke around and report back.
4:42 AM
Try Audiobook Cutter. It allows you to easily split an mp3 at silences, at whatever length you set.
6:41 AM
Interesting review, Andy. Like one of your earlier commenters, I've been turned off by expensive local transcription services. However, I also think the market for Mechanical Turk may be limited by the skills sets that are required to set up the jobs -- not everyone will be able to quickly get up to speed on Audacity or coding HTML.
My dream transcription app (described in an essay linked from my name) may be a few years off, but it will really revolutionize the market -- and also impact online video and search. I can't wait ...
Ian Lamont
The Industry Standard
8:39 AM
Ian: Your essay describes CastingWords. They charge a premium for holding your hand, the extra quality assurance, and prepping the final document, but it's still very affordable.
12:19 PM
So you effectively paid someone $1/hr?
Wow -- all those folks who are commenting at how great this is don't get to complain when their jobs are outsourced overseas.
12:34 PM
Maybe you can also find some children in India to get this work done even cheaper yet - for let's say 45 Cents? Great idea, isn't it?
12:39 PM
Not to be a prat, but based on what Andy said in the article (that transcription takes roughly 3 times the length of the clip), then a 5 minute clip takes about 15 minutes to transcribe.
Now, $2 for 15 minutes' work is $6 on an hourly basis, which is minimum wage out in my state, last I checked.
12:42 PM
Just double-checked and the post actually said upwards of 8 times, rather than three, which brings the cost per hour closer to $3, which does seem a bit low.
1:08 PM
Outsourcing to another country? On the contrary, about 76% of turkers are here in the United States, and over half have bachelor's degrees.
So why do they work for so little? This survey of turk workers found that it's a fun, easy, and mindless way of picking up spare change in their free time.
People aren't being forced into slave labor here.
1:18 PM
I transcribed an hour long episode of a podcast for $5. Oh, and by the way, I'm an 18 year old student from London ;).
1:35 PM
This is great! How does it work with the contents of interviews that are likely to be confidential, though?
1:38 PM
This only words for generic conversations. If you are talking about something technical or specialized, it won't work.
The issues is simply being able to recognize/spell the specialized terms. This could be as simple as neighborhood names and people's names. Or, it could be the jargon in a particular field.
This is part of why medical transcription costs what it does, with its specialized vocabulary.
1:39 PM
@Tod: What an inane comment. Firstly, allotting someone two hours to transcribe a five minute MP3 is ample time. Many people could do it in fifteen or twenty minutes. In addition, as Andy writes, many of the people who use Turk are from the US.
1:41 PM
Mechanical Turk workers are anonymous, so if it's truly confidential, you're out of luck. But I imagine that would be true of any outsourced transcription.
I suppose you could mitigate risk by using a tool like mp3splt to split the MP3 into teeny 30-second segments, but it'd take more work to assemble the final transcript.
2:02 PM
I think you missed my point, which wasn't that turkers are out-of-country, but that the pursuit of cheap labour is exactly why programming jobs and other services are being sent to Mumbai rather than the Bay Area. You can't on the one hand celebrate a "cheap easy" service and at the same time decry companies that are outsourcing jobs for the precisely the same reason.
Of course not. But they're also not being paid minimum wage.
2:13 PM
Think about it — If I couldn't have found someone to transcribe my interview for less than $20, I would've just done it myself. This isn't making professional transcription obsolete... Amateur transcription is opening up a new market for people that wouldn't have used the services otherwise, and people are getting paid for it.
Besides, I think programming is quite a bit different than transcription which, as demonstrated, can be done by completely untrained labor in spare time.
I'm sure there are professional transcribers who would argue that this is amateur hour and it threatens their jobs, but that sounds dangerously close to the NO!SPEC group that's fighting tooth-and-nail against crowdsourced design.
There will always be a place for professional transcribers, just as there will always be a place for professional designers. But if an amateur can do it for dirt-cheap with reasonable quality, then there's a clear and unique market for that too.
2:30 PM
I'm not sure there is any real principled difference. As I said earlier, the impulse to pay someone $1/hr to do transcription is not really any different than the impulse to pay someone $20,000/yr to do programming in India. Training really isn't the issue here -- if one is OK with paying someone very little to do this job, I don't see how one can then complain when more skilled jobs are also sent to lower wage workers.
I really don't intend to be a jerk about this, and I'm glad that you're satisfied with the quality of the work done. But for me it just seems wrong to pay someone so little per hour, regardless of whether there is a "clear and unique market for that".
3:35 PM
Ummm...
You can upload your audio interviews to www.podclerk.com and get them transcribed for about $15 an hour with very good to excellent accuracy, depending on how technical, with 48-96 hour turnaround.
I've been using the service for over a year and have recommended it to many friends. I'm very satisfied and I'm not affiliated.
4:40 PM
Thanks for posting this tutorial!
4:45 PM
I would recommend doing your first transcription, or at least 15 minutes of it, yourself. You learn a lot. Like the fact that a conversation that you think you completely understand as a listener actually has quite a bit that you can't understand if you're actually trying to transcribe it. And that is true even if you yourself are taking part in the recorded conversation: You'll find that *you cannot even understand your own voice*! With this experience you'll cut transcribers a bit of slack.
4:55 PM
Dan: Thanks for the tip on Podclerk. I didn't find them during my initial search.
7:56 PM
With the transcription task, isn't it easier to just slow down the audio and adjust the pitch than to keep rewinding (and taking your fingers off the keys)?
Also, "Now, $2 for 15 minutes' work is $6 on an hourly basis". Are you sure?
8:38 PM
Tulse: You misunderstood -- the two hours is the time someone has before the task gets returned to the pool.
8:52 PM
Glad to see people using the new interface of Mechanical Turk. With the programming barrier down, it is just a matter of time to see clever tasks uploaded on MTurk that will really use the power of the tool.
To those complaining about minimum wage: Mechanical Turk is not a place to distribute professional assignments. (Sites like Guru.com and Rentacoder.com perform this task quite well.) It is more like freelancing because people can work whenever they want, for however long they want. A normal employee does not get this.
MTurk is a tool that really brings the following benefits:
(a) allows easy parallel execution of the task across tens and hundreds of workers,
(b) allows splitting of tremendously tedious assignments into small, easy to perform micro-tasks, so that people can work on these things without getting bored, and
(c) allows multiple people to work on the same task, thus enabling easier cross-checking of the (noisy) results.
Andy, keep posting such articles about Mechanical Turk!
10:45 PM
Thank you for this. I feel like an idiot for not thinking of Mechanical Turk for this hour-long audio transcription I've been doing myself.
11:02 PM
Andy - You had better specify that Amazon Mechanical Turk does not support requesters outside of the U.S.A. :(
Very disappointing, but I thought it might be best to inform any of your international readers about this before they expend any time on it.
11:17 PM
Devan: I didn't know. It looks like HIT Builder supports non-U.S. requesters for a $25 fee. Your other option, I suppose, would be using a friend's address in the U.S.
11:44 PM
Another good reason for shorter clips: automatic timestamping. If you seed 1 minute clips, you've automatically got one-minute timestamps without explicitly paying extra for that.
10:35 AM
Whoever invents general ai will make a killing from mechanical turk ;)
11:15 AM
quote from Andy:
Amateur transcription is opening up a new market for people that wouldn't have used the services otherwise, and people are getting paid for it.
Is "amateur job" or "amateur market" the new justification for circumventing minimum wage requirements?
11:57 AM
It's an interesting question. Legally, minimum wage doesn't apply because workers are classed as independent contractors. But let's look at the ethical question instead... Is it unfair?
Should all existing worker protection laws apply to someone who's working for, say, ten minutes during their lunch break at their real job? Or a college kid goofing off in his dorm for spare change?
Turkers have complete control over the HITs they decide to work, how long they work, and where they do they work. If they don't like working 2 cent HITs, they can choose to only do $1.00 HITs.
The people using Mechanical Turk are empowered to do whatever they like at any time. I just don't think the same guidelines around minimum wage apply.
8:23 PM
Now if there were just some easy way to have Mechanical Turkers moderate blog comments…
10:39 PM
I needed ongoing transcription for my PeepCode video projects and found a number of skilled transcribers at oDesk.
I'm paying about $12/hour, with a 4:1 ratio of transcription time to audio length. The quality is great and I would never have done it otherwise.
Professional transcribers have a special foot pedal that enables them to stop the audio or listen to an instant replay. It would be painful to do it without that.
10:18 AM
Andy: people working anywhere are empowered to do whatever they like at any time, including quit. There is nothing special about Mechanical Turk workers. By your logic, if minimum wage laws shouldn't (ethically) apply to Mechanical Turk workers then they shouldn't apply to anyone and we should let the job market determine the wages it will support.
10:45 AM
Michael: That's not true. Independent contractors are far more empowered than employees, able to choose how long they work, the tasks they choose to work, and the amount they charge for their labor.
Independent contractors (like Mechanical Turkers) are self-employed, so aren't subject to employee protections like minimum wage. Do you think the government should prohibit the self-employed from working for less than the minimum wage?
5:07 PM
I run a small transcription outsourcing business in the UK .. and I do have CVs coming to me from people who will work for next to nothing (i.e. $3USD/hour)
I have done some volunteer work in Cambodia (i.e. sweatshops) the people working there consider themselves very lucky (as opposed to toiling in fields during droughts) and often support their family on their wages.
They are happy (enmpowered?) to be exploited cause they get some money, and the business is happy to exploit anyone who is in a desperate position.
This is the place of "social responsibility"...
business / people who do not exploit people just cause they can...i.e. the busimess /person will stand by their standards, values, ethics even if it means not making as much money. The underlying premise of the 'empowered worker' (i.e open market economics) is that they have a choice. In some cases, that choise does not exist.
We have a recent survey conducted on audio transcription pay scales (based on over 500 transcriptions wages) that we base Transcript Diva pay on.... http://transcriptdivas.co.uk/transcription-salary-wage-pay .. even though we could take advantage of the more desperate job seekers... we don 't.. Have and look at this pay scale and compare it . I think it might surprise a few of you!
8:51 AM
Andy D.,
It doesn't speak well of your transcription service when the page you linked has so many spelling and mechanical errors.
12:35 AM
Thanks for that Alan.
Actually the pay rates appear to be ranging from $1.80 per hour to £3.60 per hour for the people actually doing the work (see here for a review of casting words transcription payment structure).
.... compared to average US and London transcription service wages being paid this is a pretty serious (cue sound of person coughing) 'saving' Amazon is making.
I know this is a cheap service and therefore good, but would you feel good about supporting your supermarket if they were employing people for $1.80 per hour?
Isnt there is something wrong with this?
6:48 AM
I just checked out mturk by spending a whole hour checking lists of company addresses, for which I got paid the grand total of $1. Only the truly desperate will work for that kind of money, and as an mturk requester, I'd feel a bit uneasy about exploiting people's financial desperation.
There are some fun assignments that pay reasonable well, like getting $5 to create an example animation on a new DIY animation website, but I see mturk strictly as something for students with some spare time who would probably do the tasks even if they weren't paid for it.
The bottom line is, no matter how well-intended mturk is, most of the requesters are businesses trying to get a job done as cheaply as possible, with a total disregard for the people they employ; it's the nineteenth century in digital guise.
11:46 AM
Sounds great, but of course the downside is that you're giving potentially secret information to someone you don't even know the name of (and whatever agreement they've agreed to is worthless). This might be fine for unimportant transcripts, but for transcripts of interviews with famous people or of buisness phone calls or meetings, it would probably be unwise to use it.
That said, it's nice to know people are out there willing to be paid very little to do boring things.
6:23 PM
I actually am right now slogging through transcribing a 52-minute podcast for $6. At my current rate it will take 8 hours unless I speed it up. I've actually been considering going around town offering my services for $5/hr or $3/hr, I'm in Pittsburgh PA and can't find a job. I'm educated as well as skilled in many trades, and I know there's regular money to be made all around me, but opening the spigot is proving impossible. I just got back on MTurk, and remember now that I need to do a few HITs before I realize that it's not for me. There's an interesting threshold being tapped here, where someone is willing to work for so little given certain parameters (such as the instant gratification of completing a 2 cent HIT). I'm not paying for internet right now, but I am paying for my electricity, and this won't cut it! :]
7:14 PM
I think my fellow transcribers have struck a chord here. People are on Mturk for two reasons; fun and experience, or sheer desperation. I have 2 years of in-house transcription experience, but there are literally 10 transcriptionists fighting for 1 contract. The local job market is horrendous, to the point that you can't even trust your resume with the receptionist because he or she is scared that you will replace them. I currently have 3 contracts, but none of them has consistent work. I recently transcribed a portion of audio on Mturk for peanuts, only because I needed a specific, recent transcription example. Honestly, I am not too sure that the people requesting these transcriptions are getting quality work. Each and every document I return has been thoroughly proofed, researched and spell- checked. Have any of these transcripts been compared against the audio for consistency? Or are you looking at a 10 page document and saying "Wow, I got all this work done for next to nothing!"
The author said himself "I hate transcribing", yet he was willing to send that work to someone else. He had 2 hours of work done for $15.40; so still over minimum wage, but who can feed their family on that? I'm trying not to be sensitive, but I have the distinct feeling that people are missing the point here. I dont feel good about saving money if I don't tip a waiter. Sure, it isn't required by law, but wouldn't you feel bad? I understand that it is not an exact comparison, but the underlining sentiment is the same. I personally hope that things begin to pick up, but I fear the worst is ahead.
5:42 PM
We posted a 20 minute audio file... right from an mp3 recorder to my website. Then just put up a link to the mp3 and asked for the text to be formated in the format:
M:
W:
(for man: ; woman )
Took all of about 5 minutes to post up to HIT. We got back (overnight) amazing results for $10.
I suggest taking no time to divy up your audio, etc. Spend that time reviewing what the guy (or gal) did.
8:58 AM
I'm a stay at home mom, and work on Mechanical Turk in my spare time. The transcription projects are my favorite, although I don't care for Casting Words. As a former paralegal, I take great pride in the accuracy of my transcriptions. It's true that the pay isn't stellar, but for a busy mom, it's nice to be able to choose only the tasks that I have time for. I often get paid $4.00 a day for one podcast or lecture, and that is fine by me! It's not supplemental income, but it's play money! (or right now, Christmas money.)
5:03 PM
You went to a lot of work. Very clever, but I have a transciption service for which I charge the same price: $30/hour. My service is more personalized and you don't have to spend two hours building a web page. :D
4:48 PM
I just came across this site, and for those of you who are talking about it not being worth it and being like outsourcing to other countries, I have a few words.
First of all, since it is amateure work generally, you can't expect to pay as much.
Second thing, since it is more like contract work, rather than an actual full on job, rates aren't expected to be as high. Since the people doing it are anonymous, you don't sit there and have resumes sent in and interview the people working for you, so there is no need to pay much for such quick easy work that someone can do whenever they have time and feel like doing some easy work.
Thirdly, for someone like me who is visually impaired and on limited income via SSI, I have never found anything work from home no experience that even compares to this. I've joined a few GPT sites or whatever, but the pay is miniscule compared to this. I could earn with this site in one day what I earn on myLot in a month, and I have no experience, so for me it is worth it, especially since finding good work, with the economy, and the always existing discrimination has been next to impossible for me. If I can pull in even $15 per day for a half hour file and approximately 3 hours of work, or even a little more or less, as I haven't actually tried it yet, but if it really works as the review and other commenters describe, then it'd be more than worth it. $15 a day for even 4 days is an extra $60 per week, $240 per month, which for me is good money to add to my low benefits. It's not enough to take me off SSI, but it's enough to supplement it without them taking any away from me. So, that all being said, I would say that this type of gig is more than worth it at least for someone in my situation. If it really works as described, I for one would be eternally grateful for the opportunity.
Okay, sorry, long rant over, but I felt the need to comment here because I don't think it seems as bad as it's made out to be unless it's scam, but being that it's through Amazon, I'd wager it's not. Now, off to go try it. Might pop back here sometime and update.
4:34 PM
I started out as a turker but have turned into a requester (someone who pays for mturk work). The quality of responses varies widely, especially when workers have to write in freeform English. I need people who can competently write in modern English, so I did a little test. I uploaded the four Gospels from the King James Bible and asked the workers to rewrite individual verses in their own words. Click on my name to see the final results.
If you are going to do a lot of the same task repeatedly over time, it is best to qualify workers and only accept the ones who do quality work. It is easy to create qualifications through the command line interface.
9:51 AM
Those who are quick to cite minimum wage as an ethical standard might take note that minimum wage is an ethical compromise itself: the perceived virtue of improving minimum welfare is accomplished through force. As such, the fruits of it are usually not what is desired or expected (e.g. automation, facilitating outsourced and migrant work, doing without, etc.). Amanda's comments are a great example of the kind of low wage market that has been needed but disallowed through a wealth sharing scheme based on force.
When some morality is regulated, a natural result is for people to substitute the regulated morality for their own otherwise higher standard.
4:52 PM
I work for a transcription company, and I think the reason why professional transcriptists get paid decent wages is reliability. Clients pay premium for reliable services, and amatuers or hobbiests even if talented are not dedicated and consistant so don't qualify for the high wages. However, turk lessons the risk by spreading the job across many workers which muddles the quality issue slightly
7:37 PM
Though you have found a great price for transcription, I would be amazed if the quality was good. With regards to audio transcription, you will get what you pay for. Of course there are times when you have very clear audio and may be able to get a good quality transcript in return, but why chance that? There are so many good quality transcription providers out there that still offer competitive pricing.
8:55 AM
It's funny how most of the people objecting to amateur transcription services are the people that work for professional transcription services, like Melody and Steve.
6:19 PM
Andy:
I am not objecting to it at all. All I was saying is that, almost always, you will get what you pay for. I have witnessed many situations where clients ended up having to pay twice because of the poor quality they received the first time. However, I am all about saving when and where you can. Of course, I would love for everybody to come to my website for their transcription needs, but if they are happy somewhere else, then that is also wonderful. I am sorry if I came across in a bad way with my post. Have a great day.