Andy Baio has an interesting review of Amazon's Mechanical Turk being used for "cheap, easy" audio transcription. The review immediately caught my eye -- I've been manually transcribing interviews for years, and, as Baio notes, it's a royal pain. Human transcription services are one alternative, but they tend to be expensive and a hassle to arrange. I've been waiting for some company to launch a cheap, automated, accurate transcription service or software package. Could Mechanical Turk be the answer?
After reading the review, I've come to the conclusion that it's not. The service is cheap, but it is definitely not automated -- remember, this is Mechanical Turk, which is a marketplace for buyers and sellers of services that need to be done by human beings. I did not try to transcribe anything through Mechanical Turk, but Baio's 1,143-word review describes a multistage, manual process that involves:
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Sunday, September 28, 2008
Using Amazon Mechanical Turk for transcriptions: Effective, but it's a kluge
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