Heh. This is pretty cool. Jon Udell did a podcast about CastingWords. CastingWords turned around and had that podcast transcribed. Udell them reviewed CastingWords service transcribing his podcast about them. Get all that?!

Udell points out several mistakes, but for a 56,000+ word document, he said the service did a good job of transcribing.

Udell wrote:

The most amusing substitution, as Ben Hill pointed out, was swan.com (weight loss surgery and breast enlargement) for salon.com.

I'd rate the quality of the transcription as very good. Reading through it raised several interesting issues. First, there's the question of domain expertise. A tech-savvy transcriber wouldn't have written peer two peer, for example. Although CastingWords could segment its workers by domain, Amazon's MTurk doesn't yet provide a market system for valuing different domains of expertise -- or, for that matter, different levels of skill within a domain. That possibility is, in fact, one of the most interesting points that came up in our discussion.

Then there's the question of whether, or how, to edit transcripts. An accurate transcript can be painful to read. Recently, for example, Robin Good published an interview with me on his MasterNewMedia site. It is scrupulously accurate, and as such it reproduces all of my verbal tics. The worst one is that, instead of "um" and "you know," I tend punctuate speech with "right?" -- there are seventeen instances of that tic in the transcript.

A lot of other good thoughts about transcribing via mTurk there as well. Do go check it out.

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