Wow. Do a search for speech to text and you'll be amazed at how many results you get. For text to speech! Speech synthesis programs are a dime a dozen, and are incredibly easy to write using the Speech API. Doing good conversion of speech (as in audio) to text (as in written) is difficult. Using the Speech API again, you'll get dismal results, at best.
Enter
CastingWords.com. For .42/minute or .75/minute (depending on providing a link or uploading a file), you get high-quality transcription work within a day or two. I submitted about sixty minutes of audio (in MP3 format) and received the completed work in about four hours for most of it. Quality was great overall. A typo or two (which surprised me since a spell checker would have caught it), or lack of sufficient paragraph formatting. The actual words were spot on though. It saved me lots of work, and it's even available in text, RTF, and HTML.
They are primarily geared toward podcast transcription, but I think they'll translate anything in English. They do state that you can contact them about other languages. I'm sure it depends on who they have available.
They seem to do all of their work distribution using
Amazon mTurk. It's a great model, and as long as the material isn't senstive, makes perfect sense. I love the idea of providing work for people to do at remotely. So much work can be done this way, yet so little seems to be. For stay-at-home moms with pockets of time, retired people, or even students looking to pocket some cash without disrupting their scholastic schedules, this should be a win-win. Companies get a flexible workforce, and workers get flexible hours with great potential.
I've heard complaints (and I myself have wondered) because most jobs only seem to be a few cents, but it looks like CastingWords doesn't show their HIT's except to qualified people (they have some proficiency test). That being the case, who knows how much good work is on there but just out of reach!
The problem is partly that companies often don't want prospective clients to know that "just anyone" might perform the work, but on the other hand, many don't care. As long as the quality is high, let someone else worry about how it gets done. This is how it should be. It empowers the workers, and creates new opportunities for business.
Kudos to CastingWords, and I look forward to seeing more of these arrangements in the future.
posted @ Tuesday, August 15, 2006 8:22 PM