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Typingpool: Human Audio Transcription Parallelism
theodp writes "Silly rabbit, parallel processing is not just for Big Data! Building on techniques outlined by Andy Baio back in 2008, Wired writer and 20% Doctrine evangelist Ryan Tate has released Ruby-based software called Typingpool to make audio transcriptions easier and cheaper. 'Typingpool chops your audio into small bits and routes them to the labor marketplace Mechanical Turk,' Tate explains to his reporter pals, 'where workers transcribe the bits in parallel. This produces transcripts much faster than any lone transcriber for as little one-eighth what you pay a transcription service. Better still, workers keep 91 percent of the money you spend.' Remember to Use the Force for Good, Tate adds."
Seems an interesting idea for long recordings needed in a hurry, but the transcriber will be losing possibly important contextual cues by reducing the length of the utterance. Also, there is a great overhead per-person in terms of manual labour (waiting for audio to buffer, HCI interaction, etc). On the upside, it might be less dull to listen to shorter, more varied recordings than one long one. But it would suck to transcribe half a murder-mystery.