Using Amazon Mechanical Turk for transcriptions: Effective, but it's a kluge

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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Transcription job: Home, sweet, home

Editor's note: This is one in a weekly series of profiles on locally owned and operated businesses in Southern Oregon.

What do you do and how long have you been doing it? I do radiology transcription for major hospitals on the East Coast. I've been doing this 16 years.

How long have you lived in the Rogue Valley? We moved here in 2001 from Stillwater, N.J.

What inspired you to go into this line of work? I retired from the corporate world because it was getting too rat-crazy and I wanted to be home with my 7-year-old son. So I went back to school to get the certification I needed. I wanted a good income and to be home with my son when he was younger.

What decision or action would you change if you could do it again? I probably should have begun doing this sooner rather than later. The more experience you have, the more money you make. I'm starting to make good money now and if I had started at a younger age, I'd be making more now.

What's the toughest business decision you've made? Deciding on what's a good account and client and what's not, and staying away from companies that outsource work outside the U.S. I'm an independent contractor and sub-contract for people all over the United States. My interest is finding companies that hire only people in the U.S.

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MessageSling Makes Mobile Voice-Text Transcription a Two-Way Street

When you're at your desk, you have many ways to access and reply to voice-mail messages. You can use your desk phone with its ergonomically engineered keys or, increasingly, your PC with its speaker or headphone, keyboard and mouse. The process is a lot less convenient for mobile phone users. Limitations in both handsets and the circumstances where they can be used present major obstacles. Worcester, Mass.-based startup messageSling plans to use speech-to-text technology to help overcome some of those obstacles.

Launched in January 2008, messageSling made a splash at this month's DEMOfall 08 show. The foundation of its offering is a fairly conventional stand-alone voice-mail service. Users instruct their cellular carriers to forward unanswered calls to a messageSling number. They can then access their messages in the traditional way by dialing in and navigating a key-press menu. Users can also listen to their messaes as MP3 audio files, either as delivered in email messages or on the messageSling Web site.

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Medical Transcription Practice Tapes: Ways to Achieve Proficiency in Medical Transcription

Medical transcription is one of the most popular home businesses and is always high on the list of those who want to work at home. Running your own medical transcription business involves typing medical notes, including a history and physical, operative reports, follow up reports etc., so that the physician has detailed information about that patient. The physician also needs a medical transcript to send to the insurance companies so he/she can be reimbursed for services rendered.

A keen sense of hearing is an ace in the game of medical transcription. A typical hearing acuity alone will not assure a 100% accuracy in the medical transcripts you produce. If you wish to master the art of medical transcription, you need to have a well-developed sense of hearing. In this field, you can't afford to make mistakes when you're typing what the doctor says. This is because there is a very thin line between each word's pronunciation as with the terms "a rock" and "Iraq". And, in a case like this, slight misheards could mean a difference between life and death especially when you're dealing with the patients' medicines. We all know that it's hard to find a medical transcriptionist who is born with an excellent sense of hearing. But, it does come with practice. You have a lot of potential to achieve good listening skills. As we always say "practice makes perfect". You can start training your ears by watching English TV shows or by talking to different kinds of people and study their voice patterns and pronunciations. Also, you can start listening to the varying accents in English of American, Australian, British, Mexican, or Indian doctors. Really, it's your choice. Although, the best approach is exposure to real physician dictations, you can also enhance yourself through the use of medical transcription practice tapes.

But what are medical transcription practice tapes? Actually, medical transcription practice tapes are recording and storage devices used by doctors for their dictations, which are converted as wav or voice files in the computer just like that of an mp3. But, there are also those medical transcription practice tapes being used by students in some medical transcription schools, which may be bought online. They are not really that different from those used by physicians except for the fact that they are utilized for a specific purpose. Medical transcription practice tapes as the name implies are only used for practice and not for actual transcription. They either contain simulated or real physician dictations. Medical transcription practice tapes are for the use of beginners who have no exposure to real physician dictations as well as for already established medical transcriptionists who just want to attain a higher level of competency in the field.

Although medical transcription practice tapes may be rented, the best option for beginners is perhaps to have a copy of their own. These days, you need not go to a specific store to purchase medical transcription practice tapes. They are available online from several websites that specialize in medical transcription. They usually come in two sizes, that is standard-sized medical transcription practice tapes and micro-sized medical transcription practice tapes.

The duration of dictation for these medical transcription practice tapes and the level of the terms' difficulty vary as well. As an added feature, answer keys are provided to compare your work with.

Whoever said you can't learn on your own must be bluffing. Medical transcription practice tapes can truly make a difference in your performance, although it is necessary to have medical terminology skills beforehand. In fact, for beginners, early exposure to actual dictations could give you the edge you need, and for seasoned transcriptionists, or people going back into the field of medical transcription, the extra practice will definitely improve the skills necessary to become a true medical language specialist.

About the Author:
Michele Miller is the author of an ebook about medical transcription at home. http://www.medical-transcription-at-home.Visit My Websites to Learn More!