Transcription Company, Speechpad, on Forbes!

Oct. 14th, 2011

Here’s a short video of Speechpad CEO, Konstantin Othmer, talking to Kym McNicholas about transcription services crowd sourcing and the amazing high quality of our transcribers!

Transcript

Kym: You’ve worked at Apple. You’ve had the number one hedge fund company that you actually started in the world, correct? You’ve worked, right?

Konstantin: Help them get it started. Yes, I admit.

Kym: Help them get it started, and you’ve worked in Mobility and now you actually started a company called SpeechPad. It’s a speech recognition company. It transcribe audio into text. But before we get to that, I just want to mention that you’re also a premier innovator, I hear, over at Burning Man. What’d you create at Burning Man?

Konstantin: Well, we had a ride where we would take people up in helium balloons. Sort of, I guess there was a movie called “Up,” where we had 40 giant helium balloons. And sort of that Lawnchair Larry, if you’ve ever heard of that, that’s actually a true story, believe it or not. You know, I think it’s some kind of urban legend. So we tried to recreate that. And we had probably a two to three-hour line at any given time and flew, you know, 200 people on stuff that we bought over the internet and from Home Depot.

Kym: So we’ve established you as a serial entrepreneur, innovator, so it’s no surprise that at your company, you’re actually innovating within in terms of how you find workers and how you manage your workspace.

Konstantin: Right. So what SpeechPad does is we use an outsourcing model where we chop things up into little pieces, so two, three-minute segments, farm it out all over the world in a marketplace where basically anybody can show up. Housewives, 12-year-olds, someone wants to work and make some money, they’ll transcribe that piece of audio, we’ll recombine it all, and then produce a really high-quality work product back in very fast time to someone who needs their audio transcribed.

Kym: And what’s interesting is that even though you farm it out all over the world, were you surprised that most of your workers actually showed up actually in the U.S.?

Konstantin: Yeah.

Kym: Housewives.

Konstantin: You know, that’s interesting. We have a lot of U.S. Housewives. And it just turns out when you’re transcribing English, there’s so many nuances that people who speak English as their first language are just naturally much, much better at it. They produce a higher quality product. And so we rate and rank everybody. And it turns out, for the most part, all our highest-rated workers are U.S. housewives.

Kym: How do you manage quality control?

Konstantin: All our transcriptions go through a separate review step where it’s scored. So on the back end, to someone who’s a worker, it feels more like a video game. You do this work, you’ll get a score, that turns into a ranking and a rating, and that then determines what type of work you’re eligible for. So transcription, it sounds very easy on the surface, like just take this voice and turn it into text. But do you want ums, do you want ahs, when someone says like or this a lot, do you want it sort of print ready, or do you just want something that’s just an exact transcription where every little thing they said was verbatim? So it turns out there’s a large spectrum there from something that’s used in legal, for example, for something that might go into a book, for something that’s just searchable on the web, and the quality changes. And we rank the workers and the better you get, the more you can get paid by doing higher and higher quality type of transcription work.

Kym: Now, outsourcing has been around for a very long time, but in terms of what you’re doing with this marketplace, what are some of the challenges that you face in doing so?

Konstantin: You know, when you hear about the internet, you always hear about people cheating and stealing and this kind of stuff. And for better or for worse, when you’re in the business world, you sort of have to watch out for that kind of thing. What we’ve discovered through this marketplace is that the workers that we work with have been unbelievably good. I mean, beyond any expectation I would have had. They do a really good job. They’re very conscientious. They’re super thankful. They send us thank you notes, this type of thing. And so I sort of say, you know, if I took 100 of our web workers, these are people we haven’t met, that just kind of come online and they’ll do a job for, you know, a dollar versus sort of 100 business executives. Who would you trust to do a better job, to get the work done, to be more thankful? Interestingly, I would take the web workers.

Kym: The web workers, wow.

Konstantin: And that’s just another thing.

Kym: Have you been criticized for that?

Konstantin: How do you mean criticize?

Kym: Have you been criticized? Are people concerned about using this type of model in your business?

Konstantin: You know, it’s funny because when people first hear about it, it’s a little bit strange. Like, how does that work? But then they try it, and universally, I think that’s probably true. We have not had an issue yet.