CastingWords Consulting Overview
CastingWords (http://www.castingwords.com) audio transcription service was launched in late November 2005 - less than a month after Amazon launched Mechanical Turk. It was the first company to use the MTurk workforce as a significant part of its business. In this case the Workers did everything from A to Z: starting with the initial transcription all the way through to the final review of the document. Since then CastingWords has both grown its transcription business and started offering Mechanical Turk solutions and consulting services to other companies.
So why should you consider the CastingWords platform above what Amazon MTurk offers? Simply put, the current MTurk platform only provides a raw connection to a human workforce. It does not provide any effective Worker fraud controls or management. This means when you use MTurk directly you are hiring an outsourcing team that does not guarantee the quality of the results, does not interview or even know who the workers really are, has no manager oversight, and does not even fire poor performers except in egregious cases, and at that point the damage to your results has already been done.
The entire burden of ensuring quality results rests on the business using the platform. Checking all the results submitted by Workers for quality is often a task that is as difficult and expensive (both in time and money) as completing the original task. On top of all that, businesses are required to submit tax information for all the Workers you pay more than $600 in a calendar year (US government 1099 threshold) since the Worker is a contractor to the business putting Tasks into MTurk.
Over the years, CastingWords has developed a robust and flexible platform directly on top of the MTurk Web Service APIs that solves all these problems and eliminates the pain points.
At a high level, the CastingWords platform offers the following features and functionalty:
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Trusted Workforce: We have built our own Worker reputation system and metrics - what we call our "Trust Graph" - that when combined with a workflow ultimately ensures quality results
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Pre-defined Workflows and Workflow Building Blocks: Use one of our existing workflows to get started quickly or create a custom workflow tailored to your type of task to lower your overall costs
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Task formatting and instruction templates: Start with one of our templates instead of building your own task from scratch
- Many data input formats: Everything from CSV to JSON is supported and custom formats can be added
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Many data output formats: Everything from Excel to RSS is supported and custom formats can be added
- Many integration options: Automate the process of submitting and getting results on an ongoing basis by using our available APIs or alternative integration options
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Scalable system: We can process and manage millions of tasks through Mechanical Turk
- Notifications: We can notify you in a variety of ways, from web hooks to email pushes, so that you know when your work is processing or completed
In addition to the platform, we offer these consulting services:
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Expert advice: We'll guide you through the process of optimizing your task user interface for Workers to reduce your costs and time spent learning all the nuances of the Mechanical Turk platform the hard way
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Tax management: We handle all the employment tax burden of using MTurk, such as sending 1099 forms to all the Workers and reporting all of their earnings to the US Government
- Ongoing support: We stand by our product and platform, and will do all that we can to make sure you get the quality results you expect
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Get started now: Considerable time and effort went into developing this platform to make it easy for you to get your results from MTurk now rather than later. Directly integrate with our CastingWords MTurk engine or even license your own custom EC2 instance of the platform. We offer a variety of options to fit your budget and needs.