Crowdsourcing for transcription work

We are now making extensive use of crowdsourcing facilities for all of our transcription work. Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service we are able to turn around significant volumes of transcription work at relatively little cost. The trials that we have carried out so far have been very successful and we propose to use more crowd sourcing from now on.

The service is relatively straightforward to set up and is ideally suited where we are able to divide our transcription into approximate the five minute batches. In most cases where the original audio media is clear, we can turn around each batch within a few hours. There are quality checks that are necessary on the completed work and our own people need to prove each and every transcript that we get. Nevertheless, this is proving to be the most effective way of providing high quality, low-cost transcription for our clients.