As a matter of fact I mathed a while back and my transcribing speed on KUEC is well up to professional standards (I get through one minute of audio in about 6-7 minutes of work on average, last time I googled it said professionals vary from 4-10 minutes of work per minute of audio). I’m not sure how those figures would hold up when trying to transcribe people I haven’t already listened to literally hundreds of hours of, though, and if it had to have every “um, uh” and “I, I, I think” literal I’d definitely be slower. On KUEC transcriptions I cut out a lot of the verbal static that normal audio conversation has.
It’s worth looking into, though. What’s the pay like, what kind of material does one work on, what are the minimum/maximum productivity expectations, other questions like that? :-)
Background:
The company in question is called Rev. This is the job listing that brought it to Mom’s attention, which gives a short ad and a link to a bunch of generally positive reviews. (Mom, it turns out, is too hard of hearing: when they gave her a test recording to transcribe, she couldn’t even hear it well enough to finish the test, let alone pass. When she told me about this, after consoling her I said “Hey, I’m not hard of hearing, maybe I can do it.”)
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Note that despite that being a Canadian job-hunting site, the listed pay is in U.S. dollars. (The company is based in San Francisco.) Money-wise, what you see is what you get, and what *I* see is a smaller number than what I get. (My currency-conversion app has been getting a little more use lately.)
“Average monthly earnings: $241, top monthly earning: $1,440″: in other words, theoretically possible to make a living off it*, but most people don’t. (Of course, I expect a lot of people are just supplementing and aren’t aiming for a living wage, and that would drag the average down.)
So far, I have completed two transcriptions, for a total transcription time of 13 minutes, a total real time of slightly over two hours, and a total money of USD$5.76. (That is, as the old joke goes, $7.72 in real money.) However, I am a newbie and speed comes with practice. Also, people who have logged less than an hour of transcription time don’t get paid as much: 20% of what would otherwise be their pay goes to an experienced transcriber who double-checks everything to catch any beginner’s mistakes, for a pay boost of 25% (because fractions) once you finish the probationary period.
So yeah, the bad news is that it’s not minimum wage until and unless you get pretty good at it, and no benefits. Good news things:
There are no minimum productivity requirements. I mean, it’s one thing if you’re claiming jobs from the pool and then not doing them, but if you don’t claim any jobs for a while there’s no penalty (unless you count the natural consequence of not earning anything). There’s no official maximum, although I’d guess there’s some number at which they go “this is suspiciously ridiculous”, because it’d be strange if there weren’t.
As long as you have an Internet-connected computer, a set of headphones, and a reasonably quiet environment, you can work. No commute, sit in whatever chair you want.
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By default, “umms” and “ahhs” and such are skipped. Customers can
request verbatim transcripts (my first transcript was verbatim), but
they cost(/you get paid) extra (an extra dime per minute, I think).
Payment for each calendar week is sent to your Paypal the following Monday. So I’m told, anyway: I haven’t gotten there yet. (I don’t think it will feel quite real until I see the money in my account. Then, I will be Employed.)
Material varies. Interviews, medical records, instructional videos, sermons, I’m told podcasts but I haven’t seen any yet… Audio quality varies a lot, and there’s been some I haven’t understood, but you can hear a recording without claiming it, and there’s a one-hour grace period after claiming where you can bail on it without penalty. (Also they have audio filter options that apparently help somewhat with recorded background noise.)
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All in all, may or may not be enough on its own, but at the very least a potentially helpful supplement. If you have a spare hour and a half or so at some point, you might want to try applying; fair warning, they brag to their customers about rejecting 90% of job applicants (”only the best 10% work on your recording!”). I mean, who knows how many of that 90% were blatantly incompetent, but if it seems like something you might be interested in, it might be best to find out whether or not they’ll take you before you get desperate.
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I feel like I might be missing something, but it’s past my bedtime. Let me know if you have any other questions.
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*According to the cost-of-living figures in my head, which are based on averaged per-person cost for a family of four in southern Ontario circa 2014. YMMV by quite a bit.
Tags:
#in which Brin has a job #(even if it doesn’t quite feel real yet) #reply via reblog #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism
Brinens and Things 
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