I’ve received dozens of follow up emails to a post I wrote last month called Companies I’d like to Profile (but don’t exist). Today I saw another one, from Joe Mendoza, announcing the imminent launch of podtranscript, a service which will transcribe podcasts for publishers. This was no. 8 on my list.
Hi Michael,
I read your blog entry titled “Companies I’d like to profile (but don’t exist)”. In point number 8 you mentioned podcast transcription. I read that almost jumped out of my skin, I mean, it was sheer
co-incidence. Here, I just reserved a domain name www.podtranscript.com a week or two ago and was toying with the idea of launching a podcast transcription service, and almost out of the blue a mention of the concept is made in TechCrunch.I am offering podcast transcription service from www.podtranscript.com. Right now we are not offering a fee based service. Instead we are offering a sample service where our visitor can request a transcription for a 15 minutes podcast, for free. The paid service will be launched soon.
I was thinking of hiring somebody to review and suggest a price for transcription, and I scrapped the idea after reading your blog
. I went aheadand priced service at $10 for every 30 minutes of audio or video or both.
My site is at http://www.podtranscript.com
Thanks
Joe Mendoza
Joe is following my recommendation (which I pulled out of thin air) and will charge $10 per half hour of audio or video. A key issue will be turnaround time – I’d be willing to pay premium for very quick transcriptions.
Podtranscript will join castingwords in a rush to see who will launch first with this business.
I’m wondering – what is the preferred way of sending back the transcribed data? Will these services host the transcript on their servers, return a file (txt, doc, etc.), or just email the copy back to the source? I’m sure one of these companies realizes the potential of supplying an XML file as well to the source. I think that would be a great feature for any of these services to offer, as well, it would be very useful to everyone out there podcasting and/or listening to podcasts (*cough* and/or building web apps).
I seriously wonder at the pricing of this. A half hour of a podcast means at least 45mins of work by someone that transcribes using software that slows down the audio stream.
Add in a minimum overhead of 15mins to process the request and send it back and you are paying 10 bucks for an hours work. Good value for you but bad value for the human doing the transcribing. Can a company sustain this price?
My comments on castingwords hold true here too.
Transcription is a mature industry. The prices in that market have been set in the marketplace. If you can figure out a way to do transcription for a better price there are WAY bigger markets than podcasting to sell those services.
Damien, wouldn’t the assumption be that multiple people would want some podcasts, turning in the net income for 30mins of a podcast to $10 * N?
Mike,
Yeah, I got an email too. To be honest, I’m seeing loads of projects in this area – podcast transcription, turning blog posts into podcasts etc. A lot of these services are being built on MTurk, some with relatively good results. But still, it’s a crowded market and no one is being innovative enough.
But there is one project that looks really promising – Nativetext converts your podcast or blog feed into foreign languages (as many as you like!) for free. What’s more, they have the sense to create a whole new feed, rather than emailing you the results. Really, really nice idea. Blogged it here:
http://mashable...o-any-language/
I’m hoping they can find a biz model here, because I think it could be a useful service. And all the other services that are converting podcasts to blogs and vice versa should take note and offer a new feed, rather than sending you the results.
I’m also wondering how this is sustainable as a business model. Few services on the web these days seem to rely on manual labour as the driving force. Maybe if the podcaster can generate revenue through syndication, and the transcription service receives cash flow based on this revenue.
Just some ideas…
now here is a question, it might be silly, but you decide.
can someone run a podcast through dragon naturallyspeaking or some other voice->text software and then go through and have the editor listen and make appropriate corrections?
There is/was software out there 3-4 years ago to do this so it certainly doesn’t need to be a manual process. The person submitting the job could review it for correctness and then this is basically a no brainer.
See http://tim.blog...5/2/642510.html for comments I made 7 months ago.
Is this done automatically or entirely by hand?
Great information. Here’s some more information about the Visto vs. Microsoft case. Visto might have sued Microsoft for publicity.
http://www.upi....16-093508-3632r
I’m not sure how feasible this is as a business model. I’ve worked as a transcriptionist before and going at 130 wpm, the ratio of talk time to typing time is approximately 1:3 and sometimes I can get it down to 1:2. However, even going at this rate means that they would likely be paying people under $10 / hr to be a transcriptionist – a rate that I’ve hardly seen unless it’s being contracted out to workers in India.
This is feasible since we are based in India, and have excellent transcriptionists to do the job. And we have priced it at $20 and hour.
And still paying very good amount to our transcriptionist by Indian standards.
But if you guys think that I am pricing myself way below the globally accepted minimum price, please suggest me an optimum price per hour of work.
And, yes, you all are welcome to try out the service.
@Daniel, We send back the file to the source in text, doc or pdf format. Yes we are working on the xml file that is to be supplied with the transcript.
And a feed from our server for the transcripts too.
Brad,
Good point. Perhaps if the transcriber had the right to sell on the transcriptions then she/he could recoup costs that way. Or another way of recouping costs and maybe using a free model would be to offer free transcriptions in return for a share of ad revenue on the page that hosts the transcription.
If I were a transcription company I’d be contacting the main podcasters and offering my services for free to them for 6 months in return for a link back to my service.
Well, this certainly has a lot to do with copyrighted work. I am not sure everyone will be happy to see transcriptions of their podcasts. So beware of this.
I classify podcasts as one of the mediums to distribute audio recordings. It make no sense to me to form a company that transcribe podcasts.
I believe the original recording via interviews, live events would already decided if the audio should contain a transcript, not after they decide to ‘podcast’ it over the Internet.
I don’t see the paradigm shift here from traditional scribers except the traditional one can do a better job now…
Hey, this is Rachel from castingwords.com. We launched our transcription service yesterday (Dec 17), and are offering transcriptions at 42 cents/minute with a 24 hour turnaround. Check us out!
There are a number of comments here that seem to be making the assumption that listeners and other third parties, not the publisher, would use this service.
That is not what this service would be for.
The idea is that a podcast publisher could really use a transcript. More people could access the content, and the search engines would pick it up as well.
“And still paying very good amount to our transcriptionist by Indian standards.”
Hrm. The average Indian project manager / software engineer earns just over $4 USD an hour and accountants and sales reps earn half as much as that at about $2 USD. I would estimate that each half hour tape would be done on a 1:3 or 1:4 ratio or so. So $6-7 USD for the transcriptionist and $3 for the company. (Assuming that they’re paying them the same wages as a sales rep, and not as production workers who work for about $1 or less)
An additional comment to my previous one. I have mixed feeling about shipping jobs overseas. I mean, I work as a transcriptionist part-time and not as a full-time job, and it’s great to provide opportunities for others, but all the same, it’s frustrating when it’s impossible to compete with the lower wages abroad.
Trascription costs at least $1 a minute. If you can do better than that there are way more lucrative markets for transcription than transcribing podcasts.
This is so 1999, oooh let’s add the word “podcasting” and pretend we’ve created something new…
Am I the only one disturbed by the number of typos on their site? Doesn’t seem like a good sign for a transcription service.
Check out this quick podcast transcription application that I wrote over the weekend. It runs on Windows 2000 or XP and accepts WAV files as input and produces text without a human transcriber.
Fair warning: it isn’t fast – you need to be patient while it is running. Blocks of text print as it recognizes. The better quality of the recording – the better the transcription.
Here is the link:
http://www.barg...m/podscript.msi
It’s free to experiment with
Cheers,
Chris Matthieu
ESBN.ORG
Hi Michael,
I am a stay-at-home mother who prefers providing home-based services as a source of income. This arrangement affords me the chance to have a rewarding career and not be remiss in my duties as a mother and wife. This way, I do not have to sacrifice career over family. At home, I can be hands-on in both fields.
I just went out to look for an avenue where I can capitalize on my strengths and possibly earn a decent living on it. I saw the opportunity in podcast transcription because I have the facility for the language, the love for research, and the attention to detail that this work calls for.
While I know that there are established transcription companies out there, my edge is that I am operating a personal, home-based service. I am not threat to them because I believe the market is big enough to accomodate a sigle venture such as mine. Also, I can give a level of dedication and focus that no one else can. Rest assured I can meet your deadlines and still produce quality transcriptions because there is nothing else that preoccupies my time. Because I am not otherwise employed, I can dedicate all my time to this endeavor, and I am eager to start as soon as possible. If you deem me worthy, my services are there for the asking. All I ask is that you give me a try and feature me as well so I can generate some level of awareness and have a share of the market.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION SERVICE -
- it’s a personal, dedicated,
full-time service
- rates are 40c/audio minute
or 24USD/audio hour
- turnaround time is 24 to 48 hours
upon receipt of audio file and
confirmation of downpayment
- free 20-minute transcription trial!!!
just email link of your podcast
- email: notepods@yahoo.com
- http://www.note...s.wordpress.com
All the best,
dada veloso
Congrartulations on this most excellent Blog
We are a professional transcription company who specialize in providing tailored transcription service to the PodCasters. Understanding the needs (Search engine indexing) of a PodCasters we provide our transcription service for $0.35 per audio minute.
For more details on our pricing, please read our blog
http://e24trans...iption-pricing/
I stumbled across this blog while researching something else. Fascinating! I’m curious to hear what these $10 a half-hour transcripts look like, and how long it takes to get them back. I’d be surprised if they don’t need so much editing and correction that the publisher ends up working on it for about the same rate as the transcriptionist.
I’ve had clients hire me to clean up transcripts they’d tried to send through the folks who use Mturk and I assume they’d look about the same. They do just fine as long as you’re willing to devote your own time to clean it up. I think the bottom line is, as always, you get what you pay for.
My company transcribes & edits podcasts for existing customers at our standard rates, but specializing in them sounds like a no-profit nightmare.
Transcription Services – are like Susie says you get what you pay for. I do a lot of interviews and the like, and I find that in some instances that I a 100% job done – e.g. clinical interviews and other times I don’t need a 100% job done. I use a service that has a range of transcription quality options http://transcriptdivas.co.uk/
Basically if you want an ok job done – you pay a super low price (as it takes less time to do) or if you want 100% accuracy you pay more… makes sense. http://transcri...ces-and-prices/