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.
How long does it take to hear back about whether you’ve been hired? And what’s the application like – I mean, do you need an up-to-date resume, or a list of seven years’ addresses for a background check, or is it more just “prove you have these current skills”, or what?
(I haven’t the time to apply at this very moment, cos I’m tryna catch up on a bit more sleep before work, but I’m trying to figure out how much time to block out and what to prepare before I do.)
More just “Prove you have these current skills.”
The application asked for my name, my email address, my typing speed (linking to an online test to take if I wasn’t sure), and my level of previous experience with transcription (options: “none”, “some”, “professional”; I picked none). Then they gave me a short quiz on grammar and choosing the correct homophone for the context of a sentence. Then they asked me to write a thing of one to three paragraphs on a provided topic. (600 word maximum, I think mine was about 250 – 300; since they expect the entire application to take an hour*, they’re clearly not expecting a highly polished essay, just something that shows competence with English.) Then they gave me their Style Guide to read, and a clip about 2.5 minutes long to transcribe in their text editor and according to their style standards. I saw in the background on one of their instructional videos–which was filmed on an older version of the interface–that there used to be an optional resume upload at the end, but now they don’t even give you the option.
Oh, and a Terms and a Privacy Policy to agree to. I did actually read them; it was pretty much what I expected, the usual “to the greatest extent possible, nothing is ever legally our fault” that most companies do with most things, and a warning that I was a freelancer and not technically an employee, and therefore not eligible for things like employee benefits. (I did hear on their forum that if you’re a freelancer and you need an official paper proving you work somewhere, Rev will give you one. I haven’t looked into it yet as I haven’t needed such a paper, so I can’t promise that.) (Also, you know, make sure to read it yourself and not rely on my summary, just in case that needs to be said.)
Email, November 21st, 10:46 PM Eastern: “Most likely you will hear back from us within one to two days. In particularly high volume times, it can take as long as three days to get through all of the applications.“
Email, November 21st, 11:21 PM Eastern: “Good news, your Rev account is now activated and you are ready to start working and earning money!
To get started, click here to complete your account registration.“
So they reserve the right to take a couple days, but mine was less than an hour. I can only guess that the application queue was deserted and somebody had nothing better to do than review my application immediately. (I was particular surprised given that I didn’t even submit within Pacific business hours.)
“Completing my account registration“ involved my home address, phone number, and the name and email of the Paypal I wanted them to send my payments to. (Which were the same as the name and email I’d given them previously, but the fact that they’re separate fields implies the option of having them be different.) They gave me a tutorial where they showed me around the employee freelancer-only sections of the site, gave me a few short sample audios (optional but recommended) that I could try to transcribe and/or watch a video of an experienced person explaining how to deal with the clip’s particular issues.
After that, I could start right away, and that evening I took a short (6-minute) clip that I could manage before bedtime (and I could, but only just). (I woke up to find that just after I’d turned off my computer for the night, a grader had checked my work. They said I’d done very well; the only flaw was one word that they had managed to hear but I had marked inaudible. The other word I had marked inaudible didn’t count as a flaw because the grader couldn’t hear it either.)
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Things I thought of after finishing the last message:
I can’t be sure, and it’s probably still best to look into it sooner rather than later, but I suspect the 90% rejection rate isn’t as big a deal as it sounds. It’s in their interest to hire as many competent people as they can get their hands on: the larger the pool of freelancers, the more and/or faster transcripts they can complete, the more attractive their service will be to customers. (I saw quite a few positive customer reviews along the lines of “They told me to expect my transcript within 24 hours, but it came back in only 3!”.) Like I said in the footnote, quantity is good as long as it doesn’t compromise quality.
It’s not 100% true that there’s never a penalty for not working. They don’t fire you or dock pay for work you completed or anything, but people who are prolific enough while maintaining good grades are rewarded with first pick of new audios and the option to apply to become a grader, and if you don’t maintain your prolific-ness you drop down to regular transcriber.
Working in transcription would probably directly help with the feeling of your work requiring you to be mean to disabled people. In my last job, I made an instructional video more accessible. (Speaking of, Rev also has freelance captioning, but I haven’t applied to that and don’t know much about it. Rumour on the forum has it that it is more difficult than transcribing but higher pay.)
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*Mine was more like an hour and a half, and so was Mom’s from when she started to when she gave up. I do tend to be slow and cautious and triple-check everything on tests, though, especially tests without strict time limits. (Or, in other words, I’ve demonstrated a willingness to take a significant cut to my own hourly wage to ensure a higher quality for their product. I don’t know if they’ve noticed, but they might think it’s a good sign if they did. Quantity is good all else equal, but only if it doesn’t compromise quality.)
Tags:
#I’ve been aiming for a transcript every school evening #(probably aim for more on non-schooldays) #but I ended up skipping yesterday because Thanksgiving was too tiring and I couldn’t focus enough #reply via reblog #in which Brin has a job #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism
Brinens and Things 
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