Castingwords and transcription

An article about CastingWords, from NY Times

Another new idea comes from Amazon, whose Web Services group recently introduced a service called the Mechanical Turk, an homage to an 18th-century chess-playing machine that was actually governed by a hidden human chess player.

The idea behind the service is to find a simple way to organize and commercialize human brain power.

"You can see how this enables massively parallel human computing," said Felipe Cabrera, vice president for software development at Amazon Web Services.

One new start-up, Casting Words, is taking advantage of the Amazon service, known as Mturk, to offer automated transcription using human transcribers for less than half the cost of typical commercial online services.

Mturk allows vendors to post what it calls "human intelligence tasks," which may vary from simple transcription to identifying objects in photos.

Amazon takes a 10 percent commission above what a service like Casting Words pays a human transcriber. People who are willing to work as transcribers simply download audio files and then post text files when they have completed the transcription. Casting Words is currently charging 42 cents a minute for the service.

These guys are on to something.  Wouldn't it be cool to have Mturk doing lots more audio transcriptions and markups?  At Microsoft we are constantly paying outside vendors to go through tons of audio data and transcribe it with our markups.  Often we're not in a particular hurry, so something like this would work great.