Because there are so many transcription jobs out there, it can be difficult to know where exactly to begin. If you are brand new to transcribing, you’ll definitely want to get some experience under your belt. This will help you hone your skills and give you the confidence needed to start a full on transcribing career.

Once you get started in the industry, you might be surprised to learn how many opportunities there really are to work as a transcriptionist.

Ready to get started? First things first, if you’re not exactly sure what transcription is, read up on what it takes to be a transcriptionist. If it sounds like an amazing opportunity to work from home (it totally is!) then read on for 7 Real Transcription Jobs You Can Apply for Right Now.

1. Appenscribe

Appenscribe (part of Appen Butler Hill) is an Australian-based company that regularly has transcription projects available. It’s super simple to get started. All you have to do is register as a candidate and then take your first qualification test.

If you register as an English-speaking U.S. resident you can take two tests right off the bat — US Name Proficiency Test and US Spelling Test. These quick tests are designed to make sure you’re fluent in English.Once you’ve passed at least one of the qualification tests, you can see (and claim) available work.

I’ve been registered as an Appenscribe English transcriber for a number of years. And while I don’t currently type for them, I get emails on occasion for projects that are going on outside of their transcription jobs.

I just received an email inviting me to participate in a US English Data Collection task. All I’d have to do is speak a number of English words and phrases into my smartphone. The short gig pays $18.

So, know that there are definitely transcription jobs available but also opportunities to work on other tasks once you get in the Appen system. Most of the time the odd jobs they offer are really easy to do and pay pretty well for the kind of work requested.

2. TranscribeMe!

I know some people are hesitant to apply for transcription jobs because they think they might have to transcribe a file that is hours long. If this is something holding you back, then TranscribeMe! is the place for you. They break down all of their audio files into bite-sized little snippets. On average, one file is only 8-10 seconds in length.

To get started, register as an applicant in their system. From there, you’ll have to complete their Transcriber Training program. After you pass, they’ll send you an email letting you know your account is fully activated.

As a typist for TranscribeMe! you can mostly expect to encounter general transcription jobs. These pay $20 per audio hour. Keep in mind, an audio hour and an actual hour of time are two very different things. An audio hour refers to how long a recording is. In the world of transcription, it’s reasonable to think you’d be able to transcribe an hour of audio in three to four hours.

If you perform well as a transcriptionist, you may be invited to become a Quality Assurance (QA) agent for TranscribeMe!. As a QA agent you’d review completed transcripts for accuracy and earn a little extra money.

As with the other transcription jobs on this list, you don’t need any experience to apply. You do, however, need a strong command of English and must be able to recognize different American accents. While not required, TranscribeMe! (and many other companies) recommend using a USB foot pedal to control audio playback. This makes you faster, boosts productivity and increases your earning potential.

3. Birch Creek Communications

Birch Creek Communications mostly offers transcription jobs in the legal and corporate fields. Typically, you’d need experience to break into legal transcription work but at Birch Creek Communications, it’s not a requirement. Keep in mind, they prefer candidates with verifiable transcription experience. However, with a strong secretarial, administrative, and/or legal background, you can apply and may be invited to test for their transcription jobs on those credentials alone.

The tests are free to take, of course, but you won’t be paid for them. These tests will determine whether or not you have what it takes to work from home as a transcriptionist. If you pass, you’ll be assigned jobs at their minimum pay rate while Birch Creek Communications assesses the quality of your work.

If you don’t have any transcription experience, you will likely be given an opportunity to work on corporate transcription jobs first. If you do well, you may work your way up to the higher-paying legal transcription files.

4. Daily Transcription

Daily Transcription offers their clients around-the-clock transcription services. If you sign on with them as a transcriptionist, you might be able to find work any time, day or night.

There are a number of different transcription jobs available at Daily Transcription: Corporate, Academic, Market Research, Entertainment, and Legal (to name a few). However, the majority of their clients are in the entertainment industry. So you can expect a lot of post-production transcription jobs here.

At Daily Transcription, you don’t need any experience to get started but you should be dedicated and reliable. Work is assigned on an on-call/as-needed basis, so you can’t count on steady work each month.

If you think you’d like to take on transcription jobs in the entertainment industry, head on over to their sign up page. Once you register, you’ll be directed to their Testing Site which will officially start your application.

5. GMR Transcription

GMR Transcription has transcribed nearly 3 million minutes of audio to date. They offer full-service transcription services including translation, editing and proofreading.

For the most part, you can expect to find transcription jobs here that fall within the “general transcription” realm. This can include market research, focus groups, business, and conference calls. If you have a medical background, you might prefer to work on their General Transcription with Medical Background projects. This offers consistent, daily work.

If you’d like to stick with just the general transcription, you can sign up and work as much or little as you’d like. As long as you complete a minimum of 4 hours of audio each month, you can stay on board as a transcriptionist.

Of course, no experience required, but you must be a U.S. resident to apply. You’ll also have to complete and pass a transcription test to start receiving paid work. As long as you follow the instructions in the email sent to you after you register, you should pass with flying colors.

6. Neal R. Gross

Neal R. Gross is made up of a team of dedicated transcriptionists and court reporters. As you may have guessed, the bulk of their work is within the legal industry. As far as transcription jobs go, this is a great opportunity to get entry-level work in the lucrative legal transcription arena.

Neal R. Gross hires candidates with a variety of backgrounds. If you can type at least 6o WPM and have a desire to work from home, you might be a good fit. According to their website:

No transcription experience necessary, but you must be willing and able to work on overnight delivery. Timeliness is a must, as are excellent English language skills. Please apply only if you can transcribe at least 5 hours of audio per week.

This is an independent contractor position. However, you should only apply if you are willing to commit to working about 30 hours a week. Before taking their transcription test, you’ll have to email a cover letter and resume over for consideration.

7. Ubiqus

Ubiqus offers a number of transcription and audio services. As far as transcription jobs, they have legal, medical, and corporate opportunities available.

To apply, you need to be a U.S. resident and a native English speaker. Fill out their online application to get the process started. If they’re interested, they’ll contact you with details on the next step.

You don’t need experience, but they do highly recommend having a foot pedal prior to starting work. You should also be able to play a variety of audio files on your computer without any problems.

When just starting out at Ubiqus, you’ll be paid their lowest rate. As you gain experience and improve, you can work on higher paying projects. Payments are made every two weeks.

General Transcription Jobs: Learn More

If all of this sounds promising but you’re still not sold, you should head over to Transcribe Anywhere. They’ve got a lot of helpful information about starting a general transcription career without any experience. You can even sign up for the Transcription Foundations free mini course — this will give you a good idea of what it takes to be a successful typist and how you can launch your own lucrative transcription career.

Do you think you have what it takes to work as a general transcriptionist? Have any questions? Let me know in the comments below. Or, you can always email me at Ashlee@workfromhomehappiness(dot)com and I’ll do my best to help.

Don’t forget to like Work from Home Happiness on Facebook for even more transcription jobs and helpful work from home advice!

This post contains affiliate links. Read my disclosure statement for more information. 

The post 7 Real Transcription Jobs You Can Apply for Right Now appeared first on Work from Home Happiness.

Literably Jobs

A lot of people have been inquiring about a recent work from home job lead for a company called Literably.

Literably is a program that is used in classrooms. It helps elementary school teachers monitor their students’ reading and comprehension levels. Students read aloud as Literably records them. The recording is then checked against the reading material for accuracy. A report is written showing information like the correct number of words per minute and accuracy percentage.

So what’s the job? Literably hires individuals to score (transcribe) these recordings. This is a work from home position and is a great opportunity for beginners.

Literably Transcriptionist

Since so many people were interested in Literably jobs, I decided to check it out for myself to see what it is all about.

Literably Job Details

The original job advertisement was posted on Indeed.

• The pay rate is listed as $10.00 per hour.
• No experience is required because Literably has a “training mode.”
• Jobs are being offered as people pass the testing phase.

To begin testing, you need to provide your contact information and upload your resume and cover letter. The job advertisement specifically states not to worry about including the perfect resume or cover letter. (They’re more concerned with your ability to pass training, not your past experiences). Once you submit the required information, you’ll be sent an email with testing instructions. That’s it.

Literably Sample Tasks

There are just four quick steps to get started.

• Open Google Chrome (not required but recommended–other browsers have not been tested with the program)
• Create an account
• Read the testing instructions
• Score six training recordings

Scoring for Literably

Although this is listed as a Literably transcriptionist position, you’ll be more or less scoring recordings for accuracy against the reading material. As you’re listening to the recording, you’ll follow along with the reading material and add, delete, substitute, or end text as appropriate.

By providing you with the reading material text, it helps save you time as the scorer (assuming the reader is actually attempting to read the given text–sometimes they might go off script in which case you’d have to transcribe what they’re saying). This means you’ll be doing more listening than typing. For the most part, you’ll only need to type to add, delete, or modify text.

Literably Phonemes and Phonetic Transcription

Honestly, I’ve never heard of a phoneme let alone phonetic transcription before. But if you were to think of language as building blocks, then phonemes are the individual sounds that are stacked together to create meaningful words. As part of their training and instructions, Literably goes into much greater detail about what phonemes are.

But why is it important to know about phonemes?

Remember, you’ll be scoring school-aged children reading. A lot of times they’ll be sounding out words and might come up with something that isn’t a word at all. You’ll be expected to type what you hear. This is where phonemes come in.

Phonemes will allow you to verbatim type non-words. Literably will provide you with a guide that will show vowel phonemes and consonant phonemes. The guide also shows the phonetic transcriptions of common words. For example, to spell “busy” phonetically using phonemes it would look like “bizee,” “circus” is “surkus,” and “moon” is “muen.” As part of your scoring responsibilities, you’ll need to use phonemes in order to transcribe non-words.

Literably Transcriptionist Training

It takes some time to get used to scoring, especially where phonemes and phonetic transcription are concerned. Literably understands that many people have not heard of this form of transcription before. That’s why they give you in-depth instructions to help you get a better feel for scoring as a Literably transcriptionist. There’s even a video to show you how to transcribe a recording:

You’ll need to score at least six training recordings and do so within certain accuracy parameters before you’ll be given real recordings to score.

After you score a training recording, you’ll be able to see within five to ten seconds how your transcript stacks up against the one completed by Literably. This let’s you see what you missed and if you correctly identified phonemes when phonetic transcribing. When you’re accurately scoring recordings on a consistent basis, you’ll be able to tackle non-training files.

It’s interesting to note, even after you score well enough to take on real recordings, you’ll still be occasionally scoring training ones, too. This is Literably’s way of making sure you’re still scoring with a high-degree of accuracy. As the scorer, you’ll never actually know which recordings are training ones and which are not.

Literably Payment

Payment is made once a week and is based upon the number of audio minutes you accurately transcribed during that week. Once you get used to scoring with Literably, you can make over $10.00 an hour.

Working for Literably

This is not your typical transcription job. The nature of the work is unique in that you’ll be scoring elementary school children reading. Plus, with phonemes and phonetic transcription, there’s a bit of a learning curve. However, if you’re interested, it’s definitely worth a shot. You won’t need a foot pedal or special software to get started. The only thing you may want to invest in for this or any typing position is a decent headset specifically made for transcription work.

Literably Update:

So many individuals have posed some great questions about Literably that I could not answer. I decided to reach out to Tyler Borek, the founder of Literably. He was able to clarify the pay rate and shed some light about when they may be hiring again.

Here’s what I found out:

1. Literably is open to hiring international contractors.

2. Literably pay rate starts out at .50 per audio minute. This translates to $30.00 per audio hour. Tyler mentioned that, with practice, graders should be able to score 20 minutes of audio per real hour. This means that scorers would be making approximately $10.00 per real hour and not an audio hour like was originally thought. It’s also worth mentioning that Tyler and his co-founder are able to score 35-40 minutes of audio within an hour which come to about $17.50 to $20.00 per hour. Granted, they have a lot of practice, but it is a promising that scorers can earn up to $20.00 an hour as they gain experience.

3. Literably definitely plans on reopening hiring in the future. It all depends on scorer retention and how quickly the company grows.

4. Scoring for Literably is part-time or supplemental work–it is not recommended to count on scoring as a full-time source of income.

So there you have it. It’s always promising when a company cares enough to answer inquiries and provide insight. If/when Literably starts hiring in the future, I’ll be sure to let everyone know!

Note: Literably is once again hiring! Please head over to the job page to apply now!

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Because each transcription opportunity is unique, what may work for one person won’t for another and vice versa.

So when you’re thinking about starting a work from home transcription career, it’s important to decide what is most important to you in a transcription opportunity as you gain experience.

1. Accutran Global

According to their website, they’re always interested in contracting with new transcribers. As I type this, they’d like to hear from US workers available to type between 4:00 and 8:00 p.m. EST. As part of the hiring process you need to answer a questionnaire and complete a three-minute sample test before you can get started.

As far as transcription jobs for beginners, this should be one to consider. Most of their files are on the shorter side and they pay bonuses for files that have foreign accents or are highly technical. Plus, a rate of pay of $0.005 per word for beginners translates to about $0.70 per audio minute or $42.00 per audio hour.

Remember, an audio hour and real hour are two very different things. But if you use the industry standard that it takes approximately four hours real time to type out an hour-long file, that offers a pay rate of about $10.50 per hour. Not stellar, I know, but considering that many companies will try to offer transcription jobs for beginners with a pay rate less than minimum wage, it’s certainly not bad.

Pros of Transcribing for Accutran Global

• Room for advancement and pay increases
• Software provided at no cost
• Fair beginning rate of pay
• Work scheduled based on availability
• No foot pedal required

Cons of Transcribing for Accutran Global

• Work varies with “peak” and “off-peak” seasons; work is not guaranteed at “off-peak” times
• Pay only once a month on the 15th via PayPal, check, or Bank of America Bill Pay
• Limited flexibility
• Must be transcribed in Word or have Mac software compatible with Word
• Must complete assigned work without interruption

Although Accutran Global prefers experienced transcribers, this is still  very much an opportunity open to budding typists.  If you can type a minimum of 70 words per minute and  demonstrate an ability to fit into their mode of operation, you definitely have a shot of being accepted as a transcriber. With that being said, I don’t think this is the perfect beginner job for everyone.

If you’re looking for something flexible, this is not the opportunity for you. Given that Accutran Global expects that you accept work and return it within a time frame not to exceed six time its length, i.e., a five minute file needs to be returned within 30 minutes and a ten minute file would be due within an hour, etc., those who may have distractions or interruptions will find it difficult to meet these deadlines. In fact, their questionnaire that all potential typists must fill out states:

Our positions are not suitable for those with small children in their care. 

The bottom line?

Accutran Global pays a fair rate of pay as far as transcription jobs for beginners goes and offers advancement opportunities, but given their lack of flexibility and seasonal availability of work it’s not suited to stay-at-home parents or individuals looking for concrete monthly income. However, if you have a four-hour block of time that is completely free of distractions, this would be a great opportunity to gain experience, make money, and possibly advance through the ranks.

2. TranscribeMe!

TranscribeMe! is very much a beginner-friendly transcription company. They actually proclaim such on their website. This might be the perfect company to test the transcription waters, so to speak, as it has a super-easy sign-up process and user interface.

Pros of Transcribing for TranscribeMe!

• Request payout at any time via PayPal
• Super-flexible, work anytime you’d like as long as work is available
• No initial investment required
• Grow within the company
• User-friendly interface

Cons of Transcribing for TranscribeMe!

• Starting rate of $20.00 per audio hour
• Need to check Work Hub for available assignments
• Pay is reduced if work is rejected by editors
• Files are timed and if you exceed the time limit you lose the file and pay
• Files are small snippets of longer files, so audio may start mid-sentence or cut out mid-word

This type of work is all too common when it comes to transcription jobs for beginners: The pay rate is low, the files are short and the work is crowd sourced, meaning that it is uploaded to a pool and people claim it on a first-come-first-served basis.

The bottom line?

Might not be a good fit for those looking to earn serious money as a typist. However, given its easy sign-up and testing process and absolutely zero initial investment, it would be a good company to try your hand at transcription to see if it’s something you would enjoy doing on a more full-time basis.

Keep in mind, a $20.00 per audio hour pay rate translates to about $5.00 per actual hour if it takes you about four-times the length of files to transcribe it. But if you’re looking to gain experience and get a feel for transcription this would certainly be an easy site to do so.

Personally, I would recommend beginners to give this a shot for a short time frame, request their earnings via PayPal and move onto something that pays more per audio hour.

3.  1-888-TYPE-IT-UP

1-888-TYPE-IT-UP understands what the value of transcription work should be and this is reflected in their pay rates. According to their website, pay ranges between $36.00 per audio hour to a whopping $180.00 per audio hour. Again, thinking about the industry standard that it will take approximately four times the length of a file to transcribe it, you could possibly make $9.00 to $45.00 per hour. Even 1-888-TYPE-IT-UP is quick to admit that the $36.00 per audio hour rate is on the low side, but then again, it still far exceeds many other companies that offer transcription jobs for beginners.

Pros of Transcribing for 1-888-TYPE-IT-UP

• Better than most pay rates, $36.00 per audio hour is the LOWEST rate you’d receive
• Open to beginners who can pass their transcription test and meet their accuracy, formatting, and reliability standards
• Offers file-specific bonuses
• Pays twice a month (15th and last day of the month) via PayPal
• Values their transcriptionists and the work they provide

Cons of Transcribing for 1-888-TYPE-IT-UP

• Must have a foot pedal when starting out
• Can use the free version of Express Scribe but more work is given to those who purchase Express Scribe Pro
• Lengthy application process, test is emailed weeks after first receiving application
• Unique formatting for our transcripts that takes time to learn
• Does not offer second attempts if you fail the transcription test

Although experience is preferred, 1-888-TYPE-IT-UP is open to budding typists:

We completely understand the conundrum of needing experience to land a contract while needing to gain experience at the same time. After all, our first clients had to give us a chance too. As long as you can deliver good work and prove to be reliable while working from home, we are happy to work with you as one of our transcriptionists. Again, we prefer experience, but we do welcome new transcriptionists who can pass our test.

The bottom line?

This opportunity is worth the wait! Although it takes a couple of weeks to get emailed the transcription test after submitting an application, you’re unlikely to find any other transcription jobs for beginners that pays so well. Even their rock bottom rate of $36.00 per audio hour exceeds the highest rate of other companies when starting out–and keep in mind, their rates go as high as $180.00 per audio hour.

Take your time filling out the application and when you do receive your transcription test don’t rush. I know it’s easy to get ahead of yourself when you’re excited about an opportunity, but be sure to read and re-read the instructions, pay close attention to the style guide, and proof, proof, proof your final transcript before sending it in to be scored.

Remember, 1-888-TYPE-IT-UP is open to beginning typists, but only those who are reliable, accurate and can adhere to their strict style guides. So put your best foot forward with the test, even 1-888-TYPE-IT-UP reminds you:

Please be very careful reading the test instructions and taking your time with our short test. Although we receive hundreds of applications every week, most applicants fail our test as a result of not double checking their work.

If you pass, remember that a good headset and a foot pedal are both required in order to work for 1-888-TYPE-IT-UP. Although not necessary, more work is available for those who purchase Express Scribe Pro. You could purchase all these items separately or you can bundle a good headset, foot pedal, and Express Scribe Pro for around a hundred dollars.

Comparing Opportunities

These three companies are just a small sample of what you can expect to come across as far as transcription jobs for beginners goes. When you’re beginning your typing career, only you can decide what opportunities and qualities are most important to you in a transcription company.

For example, if you’re looking to supplement your income or are a stay-at-home parent, flexibility will likely be key. Remember to evaluate all the pros and cons of a particular company before jumping in. Once you gain experience, more opportunities will be available to you.

If you are truly interested in working from home as a typist, visit Transcribe Anywhere where you can learn how to start a lucrative transcription career — they even have a free mini course that shows you what it takes to be successful as a home-based typist!

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