Transcripting FTL and Other Creative Uses for VA's

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Total Members Voted: 6

[Alex Libman]

There are many "Virtual Assistant" (VA) companies springing up in places like India, with services ranging in price from a few dollars an hour to thousands per month for top-notch dedicated services.  They have real human beings who speak half-decent English and will make whatever phone calls for you that you want, keep track of your appointments, addresses & stuff, remind you what you need to know.

[youtube=425,350]0E_pN_jSLcA[/youtube]

The uses for sales and marketing, shopping, data entry, etc are rather obvious, but why stop there?  If you're ever on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, there's an ideal "life line" number you can call of VA's just sitting in front of Google or whatnot waiting to answer your questions.  Etc.  Due to increased usage and competition, the prices are coming down, and the range of services is expending. 

Have a long list of ex-girlfriends to inform of your recently-discovered STD?  Outsource it!

Want to call in to 500 radio shows under a fake name and ask about the rumors of McCain and Obama being gay lovers?  Outsource it!

Want to have someone listen to Free Talk Live for you and type up a full hyper-linked transcript for the FTL wiki, complete with an executive summary, caller index, time codes so you could jump to a specific caller in the podcast automatically, etc?  Outsource it!  

[Taors]

Sounds really boring.

[Alex Libman]

For the person doing it, yes, but we've just gave him/her a job that otherwise wouldn't exist.  Advantages of having a transcript are numerous - remember hearing something on the show once?  Just text search!  Google will get a lot more liberty-related content to spider and point to FTL's site.  And since everything on the wiki gets hyper-linked together (I'm sure the VA's can be taught to use a wiki), you'll have a perfect reference for all topics, callers, etc.  Making a reference to a show segment on this forum (or finding what people are referencing) would be easier.  And the biggest benefit for me would be the summary and the audio timestamps, which can be used to jump around the show (which can be automated) for just the things I wanna hear.

[Taors]

For the person doing it, yes, but we've just gave him/her a job that otherwise wouldn't exist.  Advantages of having a transcript are numerous - remember hearing something in the show once?  Just text search!  And since everything on the wiki gets hyperlinked together (I'm sure the VA's can be taught to use a wiki), you'll have a perfect reference for all topics, callers, etc.  And the biggest benefit for me would be the summary and the audio timestamps, which can be used to jump around the show (which can be automated) for just the things I wanna hear.

Cool. Pay for it and I'll probably use it for something.

Thanks Libman.

[Sam Gunn (since nobody got Admiral Naismith)]

How much do these guys cost?

[Alex Libman]

I figure a person with professional English transcription skills is about $6.50/hr - which is pretty high for India, Pakistan, Philippines, Nigeria, etc.  You'll see much higher rates when you first start looking, but that's domestic rates or with a lot of middlemen in between - trust me, those guys get paid crap.  For good quality, hyper-linking, summary, etc a two hour podcast would average 2.75 billable hours (rounded to quarter hour).  That comes out to about $466 per month - more than a living wage for those countries, especially for a student still living with parents.  I'd chip in $100 a month.  But since no one else is interested this ain't happening.

[AL the Inconspicuous]

I found myself mentioning this thread elsewhere:

What I'm really looking forward to is better free speech recognition libraries.  (Current software produces output that's good for finding certain keywords, but output text is just an unreadable stream of words with like 20% of the words wrong or missing, and it's especially bad when you have dialog between multiple different, often overlapping voices...)

I could then write a script that not only produces an accurate transcript of the show, but can also hyperlink each line to the podcast time, automatically split the show by segment / caller, etc.  That would result in a completely different listening experience - jump to what interests you the most, skip around, skim through some parts, etc.

This can be combined with tagging, ratings, and wikification to add additional meta-data into the transcript.  You could then just query a script to produce an RSS feed of all segments with a particular callers, topics, or keywords for the past X weeks!

(Any excuse to necro a good thread.  )