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."

Comments

Training

[girlintraining]

The biggest market for audio transcription I'm aware of is in medical transcription, followed by legal. Many of the terms used are not normal english; In fact without a basic understanding of medicine, you could easily confuse one thing for another, with potentially tragic results. This is fine for everyday english, but not in industries where terminology is used that isn't. And that's a lot of it. This would be more useful for something like Siri -- no doubt Apple has humans to process some of the unknowns in the background, and would find a service like this useful, if they don't have something similar already.

Not sure this is a good idea

[CRCulver]

Five or six years, I transcribed podcasts for Mechanical Turk. Their audio files were already split into shorter passages (3 or 5 minutes, for example). Split them even further, and the transcriber might miss out on the context, which is often vital to knowing what exactly is being jabbered about.

That said, I'm not sure who is the target demographic for this kind of work anymore. Many of the podcasts were on subjects of interest to me, and I was getting about $10/hour from Mechanical Turk, which wasn't bad considering that I was often doing the work from backpacker beach havens around the globe where a couple of hours of work would pay all my expenses for the day. But the last time I had a look at Mechanical Turk, the amount they pay had been heavily reduced. Who wants it now? Even if you are in a cheap third world country, if you have the English skills for such transcriptions, you can surely find better and more dependable work elsewhere.

That's how anime fansubs are done

[Animats]

The volunteer process by which Japanese anime is subtitled within hours of release works a lot like this.