i said tuck.
May 22, 2012 5:07 PM Subscribe
have you ever used amazon mechanical turk to transcribe voice recordings?
if yes, could you tell me a little bit about whether you found it either cost effective or useful? I'm considering doing that (have a pile of research interviews with people, and dragon naturally speaking is neat but even a 97% accuracy which i get now after tweaking mic and other settings still leaves a ton of editing and i'd rather just hand the transcription off to a human at this point...
if yes, could you tell me a little bit about whether you found it either cost effective or useful? I'm considering doing that (have a pile of research interviews with people, and dragon naturally speaking is neat but even a 97% accuracy which i get now after tweaking mic and other settings still leaves a ton of editing and i'd rather just hand the transcription off to a human at this point...
Many people on fiverr.com list transcription services. I've never used those yet there, but they have ratings from users like ebay. Ranges listed by different users seem to 3 to 12 minutes for $5.00. I used fiverr for something else and everything went well.
posted by caclwmr4 at 5:25 PM on May 22, 2012
posted by caclwmr4 at 5:25 PM on May 22, 2012
Here's a very detailed account of using Mechanical Turk for this. There are lots of suggestions in the comments as well.
posted by cushie at 5:27 PM on May 22, 2012
posted by cushie at 5:27 PM on May 22, 2012
Casting Words's lowest rate is $1/minute of audio; they handle the dealing-with-mechanical-turk part for you.
If you deal directly with MT you'll need to do some of the work yourself (splitting the audio, setting up the HITs, etc -- example) but can set whatever pay rate you want; the less you pay the less accurate your results will likely be.
posted by ook at 5:29 PM on May 22, 2012
If you deal directly with MT you'll need to do some of the work yourself (splitting the audio, setting up the HITs, etc -- example) but can set whatever pay rate you want; the less you pay the less accurate your results will likely be.
posted by ook at 5:29 PM on May 22, 2012
I used Mechanical Turk for many interviews, using Audacity and the instructions from that Waxy post Cushie linked to. The quality varies widely, but I've only had to totally send back maybe 2-3 of the 5 min segments out of dozens of 45+ minute interviews I sent through Mechanical Turk.
It sounds like your interviews are already completed. But one thing I did was record my voice and my interviewee's voice on separate channels and then separate them and use Audacity to remove the gaps in audio. Just having your interview subject's quotes transcribed, if that's mostly what you need, can save you a lot of time and money.
Paying a little more for higher-rated MTers will make your results a lot more accurate. Also Casting Words takes at least a day, most MT transcriptions are turned around in 1-3 hours.
posted by miniminimarket at 5:48 PM on May 22, 2012
It sounds like your interviews are already completed. But one thing I did was record my voice and my interviewee's voice on separate channels and then separate them and use Audacity to remove the gaps in audio. Just having your interview subject's quotes transcribed, if that's mostly what you need, can save you a lot of time and money.
Paying a little more for higher-rated MTers will make your results a lot more accurate. Also Casting Words takes at least a day, most MT transcriptions are turned around in 1-3 hours.
posted by miniminimarket at 5:48 PM on May 22, 2012
Response by poster: thanks so much! i'll probably go with casting words for now.
posted by jak68 at 7:03 PM on May 22, 2012
posted by jak68 at 7:03 PM on May 22, 2012
Waxy's method, linked by cushie, is how I've done it; $2 per 5-minute audio snippet yields really decent transcriptions, most of the time. (Paying by length of recording, rather than by pages of output, is a much more straightforward way of doing this, as it lets you and the workers estimate the price almost exactly in advance.) When I used to have to do up to 16 interviews in a month at one point, paying a couple hundred bucks to the good people of Amazon Mechanical Turk for transcriptions was about the only thing that saved my sanity.
A tip: If you can afford to wait, post your HITs to Mechanical Turk later in the week, on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday nights; they get done a lot faster then for some reason.
posted by limeonaire at 8:08 PM on May 22, 2012
A tip: If you can afford to wait, post your HITs to Mechanical Turk later in the week, on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday nights; they get done a lot faster then for some reason.
posted by limeonaire at 8:08 PM on May 22, 2012
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by jak68 at 5:07 PM on May 22, 2012