New to CastingWords

Discussion in 'CastingWords' started by PhobicTurk, Apr 24, 2012.

  1. PhobicTurk

    PhobicTurk User

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    I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm glad to hear that too, in a way. I've been feeling a bit discouraged. All of my grades are the same as yours, mostly 8's with 9's here and there, but I'm still stuck in purgatory and it doesn't seem to be moving at all. I'm sorry that your grade hasn't moved in so long, but at least I know it's not just me.
     
  2. hapless

    hapless Guest

    Thanks for the suggestion. I sent in a request to please review the grade in question. CW didn't reply, but quietly closed the support ticket and left the grade unchanged. That's certainly their prerogative. Still, I see no real flaws in my original transcript.
     
    #22 hapless, Jun 15, 2012
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 15, 2012
  3. nobody

    nobody User

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    Sorry to hear that hapless; that's a bummer. I once had a transcript get an 8 when the only change was 'until' to 'til'.

    Whoever said tough crowd was right!
     
  4. fahsky

    fahsky Member

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    I just did my first transcript for CastingWords. I don't have any experience, so I hope it wasn't too bad. It took me soooo long! I spent 49 minutes total on a 4 minute clip! I began with just using the embedded audio, but then I realized it could be downloaded, so I did that & played it back suuuuper slow. I still had to skip back a lot though... I'm hoping I at least qualify for the double pay, so I'll make a buck instead of 50 cents! lol
     
  5. pwt

    pwt User

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    fahsky,

    I preview the audio through the webpage player before accepting. I hold up a fist and put up a finger for every time I hear something that I can't understand. A mumbled word, someone talking too low, two people talking over each other, background noise becoming dominant, etc. If I can't understand 7 things in the first minute of audio, I can guess that there will be at least 28 things in a four minute clip. You aren't supposed be counted against for having [xx]'s that are legitimate, but no matter that, they *will* slow you down. If I get five fingers up and the clip isn't a third of the way through yet, I look for something else unless the pay is outstanding.

    I skip difficult audio all the time, although if you have a great ear, they do pay better. Sometimes it can be worth checking all the difficult audio clips to see if some aren't marked accurately. I found clips from an interview that just needed the loudness boosted by about 33db (Audacity for that) and after that it was nearly flawless audio. $1.37 base pay for 8 minute clips. I made $16 doing four of those and another short one in a day.

    Use Express Scribe if you aren't already. It's built for transcription. I have F5-58 setup for common keys in lieu of buying a foot pedal (I still can't get over the fact that what's essentially a foot mouse costs $70.) F5=Play, F6=stop (and backup 1.5 seconds), F7=play slow (adjustable speed; *always* adjust the speed for each audio clip); F8=backup 5 seconds.

    If you did a transcription in 49 minutes then it seems certain that you know how to touch type. Doing this will train you to type faster as time goes on. Earlier this year I was transcribing at a rate of 7.9 seconds of work per second of audio (that includes editing and everything else). Now I'm down to 4.9 and the only thing that's changed is I'm doing this work semi-regularly.

    A trick I picked up is (quixotically) to look at the keyboard while typing. I know it's strange. The point of touch typing is not having to look, but at least for me, looking significantly increases my speed from around 90 words per minute to around 120 or more.

    I almost never stop to fix errors while transcribing -- of any kind. In the time it takes you to hit backspace six times, you can probably have typed 4-5 words. I will stop the audio and back up if I fall behind, but recently I won't even stop to see if I can figure out what an [xx] is. Besides being slowed down severely by trying to fix errors while typing (backspacing, hand to mouse, stopping audio and backing up, etc), you'll have a better chance to fix [xx]'s after you're done transcribing because you'll have that much more time invested in listening to and learning the accents, mannerisms, and voices. I often find that an [xx] in the first minute that I might spend several minutes trying to figure out is actually obvious and automatic if I go back to it *after* the whole thing is transcribed.

    So I listen to the audio around 63-73% depending on the speaker and transcribe it from start to finish, leaving tons of errors along the way. Then I play the audio again at normal speed and read my transcript as I listen, and then I fix errors and break up paragraphs. The more you do this the more of a natural feel you'll have for keeping paragraphs under 500 characters.

    I use Express Scribe for the audio but I actually transcribe in LibreOffice (formally OpenOffice) writer, which is a very nice (and free) word processor. That takes care of spelling common words, word and character counts, allows me to save obsessively, etc.

    I use a simple stopwatch on my phone to keep track of how long it takes me to do each HIT. That's how I know that my transcription speed increased, lets me know if I need to do a better job selecting easy to understand HITs, etc. I keep a lot of details in a spreadsheet but it's necessary. I'm just a numbers guy I guess. I like stats.

    If you do this more often, register an account on CastingWord's site. They have their own list of HITs which groups jobs together so if you find one with good, clear audio, you can quickly find another from the same source. They also post the complete edited transcript for you to view after a few days, to see what changes they made which will improve your transcriptions.

    All that stuff together and my typing speed has landed me an average of $4.63 per hour over the course of this year. A little bit more this month, $4.70/hr. It's not even close to minimum wage anymore (it would have been two years ago), but it's not a job so you don't expect it to be.
     
  6. zinni

    zinni User

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    Yeah, ditto on what pwt said on not correcting mistakes too much the first time through. I find a lot of times the stuff I couldn't figure out on the first time through are obvious when I proofread it.

    And I often don't break up the paragraphs very much when I type it the first time through. It's not always obvious where the breaks should be, so I usually deal with that on the proofread.

    Hey, fahsky, I see you're on the Big Island! Me too! Aloha! *;-)
     
  7. fahsky

    fahsky Member

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    Wow, thanks for your response pwt! Thanks for the link to ExpressScribe, I think it'll help, because as you said, going from typing to the mouse, to a program, pausing it, backing it up, etc slowed me down a lot. I can't believe foot pedals are that much! I'll keep an eye out for one used. I do touch-type, but not using the 'correct' positions. I basically only use four fingers. lol

    I definitely could of been choosier with the job I picked. The one I went with was an interview, and the interviewee spoke soooo fast, and would start and stop sentences every few seconds. I had a hard time judging when to leave a fragment, and when to start a new sentence. Then, near the end he rambled off a book title & author in French (I think), so I think that might of hurt me! I agree though, after quite a while I did get slightly better at understanding him.

    I think that's a really impressive hourly rate! Do you do other HITs as well, or focus only on transcribing? I doubt I could get that high with only transcribing.

    Thanks for letting me know about their website! I'm eagerly awaiting my grade/payment, but I understand its the weekend and might not happen for a couple days. I'm leery about doing another one before I get that, and knowing I'll be able to review the edit as well makes me want to wait too. I guess this is a good time get some schoolwork done! lol
     
  8. fahsky

    fahsky Member

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    Hey, I didn't see your post zinni! I agree, I added breaks after I was through. The interviewee was all over the place, so I hope my many breaks were justified! lol

    Awesome, another Punatic! :D lol I live up Mountain View, I love it on the east side! Kona is nice for day trips, but ugh... to hot & expensive (& touristy) for me! Aloha!
     
  9. zinni

    zinni User

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    Yeah, I'm actually up in Hawaiian Acres. Yeah, I like the cooler parts of the island, too. Not too bad today so far.
     
  10. hapless

    hapless Guest

    (Emphasis added.) Note that "they" includes other MTurkers who are working as editors. The quality of their work varies. Sometimes (hopefully not too often), a so-called "improved" transcript may contain merely trivial or questionable changes (and occasionally your grade might suffer unjustly). Don't give up! (Well, I gave up, but my heart wasn't in it.) Persevere! ;-)
     
  11. pwt

    pwt User

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    You're most welcome.

    If it's a choice between two half sentences, I pick the one that makes the most sense. Usually it's the second one. I've run into people that will take 3-4 tries to get a sentence going, and I just dump everything except the real start unless there's good information in one of the false starts, or if the false start is long enough.

    Previewing the audio first can help avoid the really awful no-win-scenario HITs. I try to listen to at least the first full minute, then I'll skip around randomly 4-5 times to see what comes later. I had a HIT once where the were two different interviews in the same HIT. I listened to the first minute and the audio quality was perfect, and it was a nice long 14 minute HIT which paid very well. So I accepted it and away I went. Little did I know that like 1:35 into it, that interview ended and a new one began that sounded like it was outside at some festival. It was very hard to transcribe. That HIT took me over two hours.

    What a nightmare that was.

    I think it's unethical to get a hard HIT and then return it just because you don't want to do it, so I don't. If I accept the job, I do the job. But if you're severely time constrained and run into unexpectedly difficult audio, you can always return it.

    One day in April I did about 100 HITs from one of the Crowd* requesters. CrowdFlower, CrowdSource, something like that. They give you some stuff to look up on Google and then you fill in a form about what you found. That sort of thing. One type of HIT paid 16 cents and took about 5 minutes each. The other paid 5 cents but took about 51 seconds to do. I think I did $9 worth between the two before I found out that you can't just sit there and do all 14,000+ HITs they have, you can only do like 100 per week. So that pissed me off and I don't think I'll bother with them anymore because of that. (To be fair and honest, that's not their rule, it's a rule by the people that are paying *them* to get the work done.)

    99% is CastingWords:

    [​IMG]

    June 12th were random surveys. CW uncharacteristically had *no* work on June 12th. Very odd.

    Welcome.

    You may not get paid for a day or something like that, but you'll get the work approved within 24 hours. If you do them at night or in the early morning (2-4am EST) they can sometimes get approved within an hour. The grading, edits, and all that stuff are done by other Turkers (you can do them too if you have the qualification.) Even on the weekend. CW is great about that.

    Grades, edits, and final approval should come within 6-12 hours. Payment within 12 hours, usually sooner. The final edit on CW's site takes days to post because they have to have every single piece of audio from the original file transcribed, graded, and edited first.

    That's unfortunate because you might find a really clear HIT and want to do 4-5 of them in a row from the same source, and you make a style mistake in all five of them, and get 8s in all them instead of 9s and there's no way to know why until 2-3 (sometimes more) later. But you just deal with it. There aren't an infinite number of rules and the more you memorize the less often that happens.

    I wasn't paying attention the other day and was doing percents as "100%", which was edited to "100 percent". Sure enough, the style guide says to spell out the word percent.

    Learn something new every day I guess.
     
    #31 pwt, Jun 16, 2012
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 16, 2012
  12. Grimtock

    Grimtock User

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    I often wonder how long these hits actually take? If I had the time for audio, I would only take the highest paid hits. Those hits that pay measly pocket change and a small bonus are a joke. I mean you're making how much an hour to transcribe an audio that you have to listen to over and over? I tried a practice one and I was like screw this!
     
  13. pwt

    pwt User

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    That depends on several factors. Audio quality matters a great deal. An interview in a noisy restaurant can take a long time because noise will drown out the speakers and you have to repeat the same 0.5 second audio section over and over to make sure that either you get what was said, or have a justified [xx] that a grader can't get either. Many speakers can be confusing (tip: don't try to keep track of labels while transcribing, do that when you edit and can easily skip around). I once had *5* nurses in a round table that was a nightmare. Accents can be difficult. Foreigners who speak good English but are talking about non-US things can be tough, forcing you to Google popular culture references, places and things. So finding audio you can transcribe quickly can make or break your day.

    Then there's the matter of typing. If you don't know how to type properly you're going to take forever to do this. I can get up around 120 words per minute and to give you an idea of how slow that is in this context, most people seem to speak around or above 200 words per minute.

    If you type fast, have a great ear, carefully pre-screen HITs, and use a program like Express Scribe to manage audio playback, you can do well by mTurk standards. Here's what my work log looks like this year.

    Average audio file length was 4 minutes and 42 seonds. Average time to transcribe (includes listening a second time and editing) was 30 minutes and 53 seconds. Average total pay was $2.38 or about $4.76 an hour. The most time I've spent this year is about an hour flat for a 5:53 audio that paid $3.23. The least amount of time was 18.5 minutes for a 3:33 file that paid $1.43.

    Sometimes the premium audio has higher pay because nobody wants it, because it's hard. Too many speakers. A telephone interview. Something like that. You want to find a balance between pay and the time it takes you to work. Sometimes you can make more money doing a $0.56 HIT because you can do it in 15 minutes instead of the $0.91 HIT that might take you 50 minutes.

    I wrote a Greasemonkey script that takes my average time (from the spread sheet) and does a little fuzzy math to estimate my hourly wage for each HIT. Sometimes I'll see a high paying hit with an hourly wage estimate of $2.23, because it's like 14 minutes long. Another HIT that might only pay 60 cents will have an estimate for $4.63/hr, because it's three minutes long. It can't ever know the audio quality but if I tell it that it takes me 4.9 seconds to transcribe 1 second of audio on average, it can figure out what that HIT is worth to *me* if the audio quality is assumed to be good.

    Sometimes the HITs with the highest reward aren't the HITs that pay the most at the end of the day.

    My 2011 average was $2.83 per hour. For 2012 it's $4.70 per hour. Individually it can be higher or lower based on the HIT. I did four HITs on the 13th that shook out like this:

    HIT 1 and 2 were the exact same length, base pay, and grade (9).

    HIT 1:
    Base pay: $1.37
    Length: 08:02 (mm:ss)
    Work time: 39:50
    Bonus: $2.74
    Total pay: $4.11
    Hourly wage value: $6.19

    Job 2:
    Work time: 37:37
    Total pay: $4.11
    Hourly wage value: $6.55

    HITs 3 and 4 were the same length, base pay, and grade (8):

    HIT 3:
    Work time: 43:35
    Bonus: $2.06
    Total pay: $3.42
    Hourly wage value: $4.70

    HIT 4:
    Work time: 33:07
    Total pay: $3.42
    Hourly wage value: $6.19

    So that's what, 2.5 hours of work for $15.06? $6.02 per hour average.

    That beats the 2006 federal minimum wage by 52 cents, give or take.

    There are up days and down says, but money is money. It's not lawyer wages but it's not sweatshop labor either. I could never make this match even a minimum wage job because I can't keep it at that rate (remember my 2012 average is $4.70/hr). But that's not the point for me. I don't have a job, or a car right now for that matter. And this is paying bills.

    I can't speak for anyone else but I'm not doing this for fun. I'm glad mTurk is here and I'm thankful for the existence of Casting Words. These are tough times and of all the work on mTurk, this suits me the best and it's keeping the lights on for my website, keeping my cell phone turned on, and is paying off some credit card debt too.

    It may not be for everyone, but for the right people this work can be satisfying and serve a need during important times.

    Perhaps if you gave it more time and learned some of the tricks (Express Scribe I believe is why I'm earning $4.70/hr this year and just $2.83/hr last year) it might work out better for you.
     
  14. fahsky

    fahsky Member

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    Thank you again pwt! You're spot on, I got my transcript review this afternoon. I did okay, a 7. Earned a $1-something, so I got my wish! I reviewed the transcript on CastingWord's site, & was kind of confused by a few corrections made. A few times pauses (...) were changed to periods, even though it created a fragment. They also cut out [laughter] sound effects, which I thought were supposed to be included. They cut out 'I think''s too. lol Overall, I'm happy though!

    I also just did the ScriptInk, & got an 88. It states its 'Very Good', but I don't see any available HITs that I qualify for. I'll keep checking though, I think I could improve on transcription enough to make steadier pay than just searching for decent >5 minute surveys.
     
  15. pwt

    pwt User

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    You're welcome. Transcripts are supposed to be private to protect the Casting Words' customers, but if you want to email me off the forum and show me some pieces of the edits that didn't make a lot of sense, maybe I can help you out with that.

    I've yet to try any other transcription requesters. SpeechInk seems to pay well but I don't want to get locked into doing a 1-3 hour piece of audio that might literally take all day. At least with CW if you get stuck with a bad HIT, it won't ever take *all day* to do. Sometimes having them in 3-14 minute chunks is a real benefit. It very much suits me to have the work be on-demand. For something that long, it needs to pay more. That's more like real contract work IMHO.
     
  16. PhobicTurk

    PhobicTurk User

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    I think this is brilliant and I wanted to copy it, because it's really outstanding advice. I'm going to start following this ASAP. I would usually click around a few times in an audio clip before accepting, but there have been times when I've gotten a clip that had so much I didn't understand or felt unsure of, transcribing was a horror show.
     
  17. nobody

    nobody User

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    I have to thank you for this pwt. I had read this before on other sites, but had never tried it until I read your post. Guess what? It helped! I managed to shave some time from my transcriptions, so I no longer spend an hour doing an 8 minute HIT. Thank you!

    It is much easier for me to just plow through the clip leaving as many xx's as I need to. Then I listen again and catch many more xx's than I did before. I'm kicking myself for not trying this sooner. :/
     
  18. pwt

    pwt User

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    You're welcome. I also use a feature of Express Scribe from time to time called something like "Play (with pausing)". It'll play a few seconds of audio, pause, backup ~1.5 seconds, then keep playing. Unfortunately it's not configurable and the company that makes it is too lazy to make it so. I found a thread on their website forum with people asking for it and some employee said they'd add it as a suggested feature.

    That was 2009.

    It really needs to be configurable because sometimes it's absolutely perfect. Other times I could do well with it playing longer before stopping and backing up.

    But for speakers of a certain speed it can help quite a bit. I did 8 HITs early this morning all from the same interview. Using that feature instead of slowing down audio cut my transcription+edit time from around 22 minutes each to around 16 minutes. Not slowing it down and only pausing it when I needed to (something I suck at because I almost always hit the wrong F key) brought it briefly down to 13 minutes, but I had to go back.

    Those were some sweet HITs, one of the rare ones marked as difficult audio that really quite easy to understand. I ended up making $17.35 off them. Great run. I love days like that because they more than offset the days where there's nothing but hard junk. Lots of awful quality phone interviews, things like that.
     

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