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Well, drat. Applied to 3Play to maybe pick up some extra holiday work and got the brush off. Kind of annoyed it starts with the test only and not any place to send a resume; "I've been doing this 13 years" tends to get more attention in this business. 
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Nov 19, 2021 03:56
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Yeah, I gave them a ping when some of my other clients slowed down and I saw an ad saying .75-.85 a minute, which isn't *terrible* nowadays, but the first file they threw me was verbatim transcription at .60/minute and I told 'em I had to pass. They weren't bad to work for when I worked for them, but that was back in the 2012 range so things might have changed. If you do go with DT and you're US-based, do a couple of months and then start watching Craigslist like a hawk. There are still outfits hiring at $1 a minute or thereabouts, but they want demonstrable experience nowadays.
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Mar 29, 2022 13:10
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Wow, found a new bottom of the barrel. TranscribeMe lists on Flexjobs at $15 per hour. Any transcriptionists can guess what they actually mean.
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Mar 31, 2022 02:25
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Speaking of writing tools, can I just say I hate Grammarly with the burning fire of a thousand suns? One of my clients requires me to run everything through it as a final step, and they're utter masters at monetization-- it's absolutely free, BUT you can't tell it "ignore this issue" unless you pay for the loving thing. So if I do an hour-long transcript, I then have to click "dismiss" like 250 times to get it to ignore all the bad grammar or inefficient wording the subject used. I'm considering subscribing just for the ability to shut the loving thing up.
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Jun 6, 2022 16:43
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Slightly Used Cake posted:What the gently caress why? What would be the point on a transcript? No clue but it's a freaking nightmare. I do know that the first test transcript I turned in I didn't run it through Grammarly and they knew. The only thing I know it constantly wants me to do is manipulate commas and hyphenate terms, so maybe when they realized their run-through was finding a lot of poo poo like "first time" and "second place" and stuff without dashes they figured it out. Of course, I can't just hit "accept" on everything because it'll put commas and dashes in really stupid places, so hey. But yeah, any time I'm doing a transcript where the want it remotely verbatim I know the stupid robot's going to scream at me that they used the word "really."
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Jun 8, 2022 05:59
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dms666 posted:For those who want to do the whole writing thing, check out ClearVoice as well. You do need some prior published content to build out your portfolio before you get approved though. I started out with 500-600 word articles for $40, but do randomly get 600 words for $97.50 from this one particular client. Everything else is anywhere in between that. It can get thin at times just like every other site though. Huh. I've actually got published stuff under my pen name. The bad news is it's Demand Studios content-mill poo poo. The funniest thing I ever saw was when I Googled my pen name and found people citing me. It's turtles all the way down.
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Jun 18, 2022 06:39
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It's like the first thing you learn from content mill writing is how to recognize other content mill writing. C'mon guys.
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Jun 19, 2022 00:22
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"We're giving you .25 extra a minute because this job requires some research." The research I'm used to: Googling names of individuals and companies for spelling purposes. The research they required: reading articles about Yoruba mythology to identify spiritual terms, pasting Arabic script into Google and trying to work out the transliteration spelling of the correct root words. It's really fun when the dude says something you don't understand and your first decision has to be whether to search a Bantu dictionary for it or an Arabic one. Then watching as Grammarly utterly poo poo the bed when I ran it. NO YES I MEANT TO TYPE OLODUMARE GOD drat IT (The good news is I'm totally reading more about Yoruba beliefs, the structure is really fuckin' cool.) kazmeyer fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Jun 30, 2022 |
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Jun 30, 2022 22:39
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So, trip report. With things slowing down I decided I'd try applying to Allegis to see what their situation is, because they've been advertising a lot. They took one look at my resume and took me into their training program. Had to do a lot of talking about "hey I don't just work with you guys" because they're used to having transcribers at their beck and call but they insisted that they'd be flexible to work within my existing workflow. So, first of all, their transcription suite involves their own transcription software, a VPN connecting you to their servers, and Veracrypt to encrypt your files. What they don't tell you is that there's a "monitor" program that installs along with the transcription suite. Now, when I found the logs, all it was logging was when I was pressing my foot pedal-- but it was doing since it had been installed, not just when I was running their transcription software. I told them I couldn't have their program collecting data while I was working for other clients, and they allowed me to disable their programs when not in use instead of having them run at startup every single time. I get the feeling they weren't happy about that. (They also swore that it wasn't collecting any other data and they weren't looking at the logs, but you know how that goes.) So the pay rate didn't seem to be abysmal. It's a per-page rate, and you're logging insurance calls, so there's a lot of one-word answers and "yeah" "uh-huh" that move you down the page relatively quickly. Compared to a lot of the places you can get hired on as a newb it didn't seem too bad. For the sample files it was looking like somewhere around .80-1.00 per minute. The dealbreaker was the audio. These are all recorded phone calls, and the audio was loving abysmal. One of the test files was basically Charlie Brown's teacher, and they griped at me for using [inaudible] tags. I think of the nine test files I did, one of them was what I'd consider acceptable from another client. So right now I'm sandbagging the last part of the testing process so they'll can me. (If you quit, you're supposed to reimburse them for the background check.) Fortunately, I stumbled across a WAY, WAY better client basically three days after I signed up with Allegis, so I won't miss 'em.
kazmeyer fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Jul 1, 2022 |
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Jul 1, 2022 23:47
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Now it's all done with a weird-rear end Word template. It's honestly not super bad, but there are all these insane, fiddly little rules depending on where the file's coming from. And God help you if something seems off, getting a response is like pulling hen's teeth unless it's before noon. Now their software lets you download the mp3, but it's encrypted and deletes itself when you shut down the program. It's still clunky as all gently caress though and a huge speed bump compared to my usual workflow. Now they've got two sides. Insurance is the basic one, pays okay but the audio and work is just a septic tank fire. They've got a legal side, but you either have to work your rear end off in the insurance side for a year first, or take some $200 transcription course (that they say they'll reimburse you for) to get into the legal stuff. The legal stuff is apparently less horseshit to deal with and they say it pays better, but honestly, the bureaucracy around it turned me off from the get-go. I much prefer the "hey is there work to do great send me something" model most of my clients go with instead of quotas and tiers and work stoppages and poo poo. Still, if you're completely new to this and can put up with a lot of bullshit, it looks like they'd pay pretty decently to start with and then once you've got some experience under your belt you could look for better gigs. Getting off the ground floor's getting harder and harder in this business, so finding places that just aren't utterly loving you over is at least a start. I got into an argument with some goober on Reddit who was defending TranscribeMe, who starts you at .25 a minute but supposedly if you bust your rear end for four months you can get up to .90 or so on their QA team. Just gotta put in your time making $3.75 an hour.
kazmeyer fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Jul 2, 2022 |
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Jul 2, 2022 02:34
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Yeah, I'm used to research, but this job was loving nuts. I totally want to convert to the Yoruba religion, though. (Massive oversimplification and western limited understanding incoming, apologies if there's actually anybody who really knows this poo poo here, this is just what I picked up in like two hours of tape.) It's set up sort of like Catholicism, in that you've got a big creator God who's too busy creating to worry about your little human problems, so there are a bunch of lesser deities called orisha that each have a purview. But unlike saints, where you shop around depending on what you need at the time, the Yoruba generally pick one (sometimes two) orisha and follow them exclusively. Now, whichever orisha you pick, you get certain perks and restrictions. Like, say you pick Shango. Shango's the orisha of lightning and thunder and drumming and dancing (among other things). So right out of the gate, you get a lifetime pass for being a big swingin' dick, because everyone knows you follow the coolest orisha there is so they kind of just expect you to be a jerk. But you can't eat cowpeas, because another orisha Shango has beef with will wreck your poo poo, and you can't go into deep water because one of Shango's exes might get jealous and steal you away from him. Other orisha do things like you have to go tell a river every time you're doing something important, or you can't climb trees because you might just disappear or do certain dances because they have beef with Shango and he'll hit you with a lightning bolt for showing off. It's like D&D classes meet religion. But the best part is, the restrictions and poo poo are all personal. If you're a child of Shango, you can't go into the lagoon, but if you're a child of Oshun, you can go swimming all you want. It's all "my god doesn't let me do this, but you do you." Which I really wish western religion would get on adopting like tout-suite.
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Jul 2, 2022 07:37
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Whew, Allegis told me to gently caress off. I was worried I'd have to go through another week pretending I wanted to transcribe blown-out compressed-audio static for sub-par rates. EDIT: God drat their bullshit software is a pain in the rear end to get rid of. They configure it without a password, so you have to go into the VPN/monitor, lock it with a password, unlock it, and then you have a brief window to uninstall it before it re-locks itself. kazmeyer fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Jul 6, 2022 |
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Jul 6, 2022 16:11
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Oh my God it's like every week now I get some new torment. This one is a pretty fascinating interview with a trans woman who's spent decades as an activist in DC. But CHIRP the goddamn CHIRP interviewer forgot CHIRP to replace the loving CHIRP batteries in CHIRP her loving smoke CHIRP detector she's apparently CHIRP sitting directly loving under CHIRP and it's CHIRP a loving CHIRP nightmare. I can't even wear headphones on this because she'll be talking and the gain will drop and two or three of them are fine but then one happens in dead silence and it's 300 loving decibels. The goddamn pharma earnings call I've got set up for afters where I'm going to have to look up eight million cancer drugs with 15-letter names is going to be a cakewalk compared to this.
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Aug 11, 2022 00:35
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Just had a client send me a snippy note for misspelling "Google." I got to explain to him that given the physicist's use of the phrase "single-helix, double-helix, googol-helix" he was probably referring to the number instead of the search engine. I'm planning on taking a sabbatical next spring to get some certifications in and I'm honestly just thinking about enrolling in school and saying gently caress this. My patience isn't what it used to be.
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Dec 12, 2022 18:47
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Shima Honnou posted:Are transcription outfits still a thing? Want to get back into that to bring in a bit extra, but I know Daily Transcription seems to be full and HR doesn't check their emails over there. It's the worst time possible to try to get back in; the writer's strike has really killed workloads for most outfits. Also there's been a ton of consolidation, some companies have had problems making payroll, at at least one of the big names collapsed and shut down entirely (and I think left people owed money).
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Jul 7, 2023 19:29
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Transcript Divas. They're a UK outfit that had a US branch, and I did some work for them over the last year. They started getting super flaky with payments, and then stopped paying out altogether and put up a notice on their site they weren't accepting new jobs until June. Fortunately, I'd just managed to get my last invoices paid out, but I know a few people I was interacting with that were owed money at that point; when I went back to the site earlier this month it was gone. The UK site is still there but says they hire UK transcribers only. Captionmax got bought by 3Play, yeah. I was on the rolls there, and they said I needed to apply to 3Play, but apparently I applied there sometime in the dark ages and so any time I put in my email address it just says "we already received your application and we'll get back to you once it's processed".
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Jul 8, 2023 12:29
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Fortunately, there's still going to be a market for captions and transcripts that are actually correct, at least for a while yet.
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Jul 17, 2023 23:50
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 06:58 |
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So, uh, just wanted to put this out there. With transcription turning into a ghost town I've also jumped on board the annotation train and I've been getting some fun gigs. But I just applied for a new one and... well... They're basically asking us to Voight-Kampff LLMs and try to get them to give inappropriate responses. So, like, if I accidentally create Roy Batty or Skynet or something I wanted to apologize to everyone in advance.
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May 16, 2024 02:55
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