Finished adding high-quality transcripts to every episode of Stacking the Bricks!

As of yesterday, every episode of the Stacking the Bricks podcast has a transcript that's not only cleaned up for accuracy, but human-edited to be easier to read for people who are only reading the transcript.

This has been on my to-do list for sooooo long, and finally realized that Descript filled in a gap in the workflow that I'd been struggling with.

For $15-30, I've found Descript's AI powered transcripts are remarkably good even when speakers have a relatively strong accent. (It's not good for non-english speakers though).

They're not perfect, but I find them to be getting closer to the quality that I've gotten from paying $1-1.50 per minute for human transcriptions. The combo of paying that much for human transcripts that still need to be cleaned up AND edited to be truly human-readable would take them up over $2-3 per minute, and that just never made sense.

But if I could get the base transcript for next to nothing (built into my Descript plan, which I was already paying for and using to edit new episodes), I could just pay a human for high quality cleanup. Maybe that'd do the trick!

So I decided to try to find that human on Upwork.

Creating and Running an Upwork Test Project

Here's what I posted:

Clean up Audio Transcriptions - 40-60 mins each

Back catalog of ~35 podcasts with transcripts generated by Descript. Average length 40-60 mins each.

Looking for an independent freelancer to clean up the transcripts so they are clear to read and error free. Example visible at https://stackingthebricks.com/podcast/ep35-debugging-humans-with-michele-hansen-and-colleen-schnettler/

New episodes shipping weekly, happy to continue working with someone consistently every week once we see quality work.

I got ~20 responses, and based on reviews and the quality of their profiles, narrowed it down to 10 and gave each one a trial projects.

In the trial, I gave each person the same ~15 minutes of auto-generated transcript along with the source audio, and asked them to clean it up.

Most of the 20 people only did just what I asked, and most of them had pretty egregious mistakes. Only 3 people out of 20 did the full assignment and to an acceptable quality.

One stood out, however, and not only did a great job with the assignment but also offered two additional things that I hadn't asked for but made the final product better.

Needless to say, I hired her! She was the most "expensive" of the bunch ($20/hr) but I wasn't surprised to see a price correlation to the quality of the results, and happy to pay it if the results were consistent.

I paid everyone else their rate for the test project, plus a bonus/tip as a thank you.

Details of the process

For the first few full episodes, I had her do one transcript at a time so I could give clear and specific notes about the stuff she did well, and the stuff that I wanted to see done differently. I had already removed filler words like "uh" and "um" with Descript, but she pulled out other verbal tics, repeated phrases, and even tuned up sentence structure and added punctation for clarity.

Without my asking, I noticed that she was even going out of her way to look up words and jargon that she didn't recognize to make sure she spelled things correctly, which made me REALLY happy.

She learned quickly, and after 2 episodes I felt confident sending her off to work through our full archive of ~40 episodes.

I delivered the rough AI generated transcripts in batches of 10 episodes at a time. Exact turnaround time per episode varied a bit but it ended up averaging 3-4 hours of editing per episode, or an average of $70.

I made it clear that quality was my priority, not speed or price. I think this helped a lot.

Overall Timeline and Price

From start to finish, she took about 3 weeks to complete our ~40 episode backlog, and that includes doing a couple of new episodes that I released during the project.

Total cost ended up just over $2100, which comes out to a little over $1 per minute for her editing for very high quality transcripts that are good enough to be read without the accompanying audio.

Naturally, the success of this project really came down to finding the right person, and I was pleasantly surprised with finding her on Upwork. I think the key is remembering that most applicants will be somewhere from bad to mediocre, but spending a little bit upfront to pay a number of people to do a test project increased my odds of finding a good one.

Hope this helps anyone else who's struggled with finding freelancers on Upwork (or people who are on Upwork trying to stand out!)

And check out some of the Transcript examples on the episodes at https://stackingthebricks.com/podcast/