Mechanical Turk Case Study: CastingWords

Podcasting is an emerging trend that makes use of two of today’s most popular technologies: portable MP3 players and RSS Web syndication. Independent producers or traditional radio broadcasters can create audio programming that users can subscribe to via RSS feed, download to their MP3 player, and listen to at their leisure.

Because of their audio format, it’s difficult to use online search engines to find information contained in a podcast. Additionally, without MP3 audio capabilities, some audiences might not have access to podcast information at all. And that’s where CastingWords comes in to play. CastingWords provides transcription services to podcasters at affordable prices. All podcasters need to do is upload a link to the podcast they want transcribed on the CastingWords Web site. CastingWords provides service to customers 24 hours a day, and can quickly turn around transcription work at a very competitive price.

The CastingWords service relies on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Mechanical Turk is a Web services API that allows computers to integrate human intelligence tasks into their processing. Using the example of podcast transcription, there are artificial intelligence offerings like voice recognition software that can transcribe audio data into text. However, there’s no question that a human transcriber can do the job better than a computer. By applying the Mechanical Turk API, users can post human intelligence tasks like transcription to the Mechanical Turk site. People who are qualified and interested in completing the task can download it from Mechanical Turk and begin work. The financial reward and deadline for the task are also provided in the Mechanical Turk listing.

CastingWords takes transcription orders from podcasters via its Web site. CastingWords then posts the project to Mechanical Turk, offering the job to approved transcribers. Because CastingWords doesn’t have to work though a third-party outsourcing firm, it can offer transcription services to podcasters at the lowest price in the industry. Additionally, the company saves on operating costs by working exclusively with freelance transcribers. And the 24×7 nature of Mechanical Turk lets CastingWords promise its customers an extremely competitive turnaround time on their transcription.

“Working with Mechanical Turk has given us a great amount of flexibility, which has been very advantageous at this early stage in our business. We immediately gained a tremendous pool of qualified people to take on our transcription projects with practically zero investment. And instead, we’ve been able to focus resources on developing new opportunities for our company,” said Nathan McFarland, co-founder, CastingWords.

Mechanical Turk was exceedingly fast and easy to implement; it took CastingWords less than one month from the conception of their business idea to get it up and running—and profitable. Because the company was able to get its service to market so fast, it’s been able to position itself as the market leader before competitors have a chance to establish themselves in the podcast niche.

“Mechanical Turk is very cool. It helped make CastingWords a reality in virtually no time at all,” said Rachel Richard, co-founder, CastingWords. “We feel like our transcription service is really helping make podcasts more accessible and searchable, and we look forward to continuing our work with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to develop additional CastingWords services, including editing and translation offerings.”

For more about CastingWords, go to http://www.castingwords.com This link will launch in a new browser window or tab.