Nathan McFarland, co-founder of CastingWords, tells us about his audio and video transcription service that utilizes Amazon Mechanical Turk. We created this business because we were having a very hard time with the searchability of audio. We were big into podcasts, which were impossible to find. So we started transcribing podcasts to increase searchability. That eventually led directly to a business, doing that for money. There aren’t any companies who do good voice recognition of untrained audio so there is a need in this market.
We were always big on MTurk. So most things were natural, and we went straight for a MTurk solution for almost everything, including editing our home page and all kinds of stuff including marketing. Over time we eventually started using the MTurk workers to proof the work. Before we were taking the work ourselves and saying about each transcription: “Yeah, this is good”, “Yeah, this isn’t good”. We started using MTurk workers for that and have never turned back. This grading of the work using Mechanical Turk is something that we view as one of our core competencies: it’s actually what we sell most to our consulting clients. This gives our customers the ability to not only get their work done and back but also to pay the right amount for the highest-quality work.