Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of guest blog posts from customers and developers who are building on top of Mechanical Turk. Today's post is written by Konstatin Othmer, founder and CEO of SpeechPad.
At SpeechPad, we provide high quality transcription services for companies such as Citrix & SEOMoz. We use crowdsourcing and speech to text automation technology, to offer transcription services with lower cost, higher quality, and faster turnaround time.
When we started using Mechanical Turk, we were really surprised by the quick turnaround time and high quality results. One of our early customers was a large national insurance firm. Their quality requirements were very high so we had to build transcription and review workflows as well as automated tools to make sure the final product conformed with this customer’s style guide and quality requirements.
A few things make Speechpad unique. We combine the best of human labor with the best of computer automation to produce a final work product. Almost every transcription has multiple workers transcribing, reviewing, or editing it to make sure that our final product is high quality. To guarantee quality and to route work appropriately, we have a sophisticated rating, ranking, and reputation system – “the three Rs” - that determine worker pay, bonuses, job eligibility, and amount of review the work product receives.
As we expanded our customer base to technology and financial services companies, we found the transcription requirements were quite a bit different so we had to tweak our workflows and tools. We’re proud to say that our customers have told us that our quality is higher than the previous transcription companies they had been using.
Our future direction includes making audio acquisition easier for our customers. We have an iPhone application available in the app store as well as tools on our website for recording calls. We believe that the combination of smart phone growth and our tools and workflows will allow us to change the way transcriptions are done today. We’re super happy to be working with Amazon Mechanical Turk to help bring that vision to reality.
Please give our service a try at www.speechpad.com!
-- Kon
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