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Several months ago, my partner told me about a you service Amazon had started offering called Mechanical Turk.  I guess I must have been so put off by the name that I never even looked into what it was about, or listen to him as he was telling me about it.  Sorry, Rick.

Today, I was out on the net searching for transcription services, since I am getting ready to start a few new teleseminar series and want to get the audio transcribed for deloping related products in our funnel.  One of the services I was told about early on was CastingWord.com by Stu McLaren.  At first when I heard about from Stu, I believe it was actually a free service if you allowed them to publish the transcripts.  This was meant as a service for podcasters to get their programs transcibed and offered along side the audio podcast.  Not a good choice if you are using the transcripts to create a product.  Now days, CastingWords has raised their prices considerably.  If you can wait a month or more for your transcript, they’ll do it for 75 cents a minute.  With no time limit on when you’ll get the results, I doubt anyone is taking this option.  the second option from CastingWords.com is a 6 day turnaround for $1.50 a minute.  So for a 6 day turn around, you’re paying $90 for one hour of audio.  The last option is a one day expedited service for $2.50 a minute.  This bring the one hour audio price up to $150.  If you are in a time crunch, this could still be a good option.  One alternative, I have been looking at in the past is IDictate.com which charges 1 1/4 cents per word for a single person speaking of general transcription.  Medical and legal transcription is more, along with multiple speakers.  I still think this would be less expensive than CastingWords.com but I haven’t tried either one.

Another alternative is local listing in Craigslist.org.  I was able to find a couple local people through Craigslist that charge $60 per hour of audio in what ever format you can provide.

So, getting back to the title of this post.

While I was out on CastingWords.com, I was reading different articles about their service and came across one about technology and how it was changing the landscape of business.  in the article, it did mention CastingWords.com however it actually mentioned where they were going to get their transcriptions completed.  I don’t know if they intended for this to be included on their site or they are simply filter out search results mentioning their site and including them on their press page.

Mechanical Turl (MTurk.com) is the service that CastingWords.com is using to complete their transcription requests.  Of course they are paying the turks that take their projects significantly less than what they are charging us.  They are in business to make a profit right?

Here is an interesting quote on the MTurk.com site from CastingWords:

“Working with Mechanical Turk has given us a great amount of flexibility …We immediately gained a tremendous pool of qualified people to take on our transcription projects with practically zero investment.”

Notice the description in italics after Nathan’s byline: solely uses Mechanical Turk workers for its transcription tasks

So today, I decided to go directly to the source and opened a new account on MTurk.com.  I had a recording of a teleseminar I did earlier this year on goal setting and create a new project for it.  For 45 minutes of audio, I offered $25.  It looks like my offer is high compared to other transcription projects up there, but I am hoping the results reflect the higher price. 

Check my dashboard on the site, it looks like someone has already accepted and started my project.  Once it is accepted, I allowed a 24 hour turn-around time.  I deposited $60 in my account today, so hopefully the site works out and I start using it more often for several tasks in my business which I should be outsourcing.

I am seeing many other types of projects out there, including site review, link building with forum posts, and article writing.  I may start moving some of my article work up there as well in order to get more done, since my writer in India has abandoned me for the last couple months.

The reward to the worker is awarded upon your acceptance of the work, which is great.

If you need to outsource some of your daily tasks, you might want to check out Mechanical Turk.