I heard of CastingWords about six months ago and was dying to try out their service.? In fact, CastingWords introduced me to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system through a link on their homepage.

Well, over the past few weeks I’ve sent them 3 transcription jobs from phone interviews I’ve conducted.

Two of the jobs are finished and one is still being processed.

The first job I submitted exactly two weeks ago and I just got it back tonight.? I guess they have a backlog.? I haven’t looked through it in detail, but it looks good generally.

The second job I submitted one week ago and got back the next day.? This is because I paid for their “Expedited” service, which is almost 3 times the cost of the standard service.? The audio was? short enough and I was impatient enough that I just paid the full cost.

Actually, I paid for the standard service for this first call.? Then my impatience got the best of me and I put the job in a second time in an expedited manner.? There was no way to cancel the first job, so I just ate the cost.? And I’m still waiting for it a week later, but it will be discarded anyway.

The first thing I realized from the transcript is that I don’t speak in complete sentences.? In fact, it appeared that I am barely coherent at all when I’m speaking!? I really am a mess.? It took some serious editing of the transcript to make it readable.? This wasn’t the fault of CastingWords.? They tried.? I ended up deleting and rewriting whole sections of the transcript so it would make sense.

I really love CastingWords.? It is so great that one less thing in my Internet business requires me to deal with finding my a service provider myself.? Not only is it cheaper than a solo transcriber would charge, the results are more predictable and it takes all of 2 minutes to request and pay for a transcription.

This service is a keeper.

-Chris