Pros
They provide the opportunity for a great work-life balance in that you can work from home setting your own hours. If you enjoy linguistic challenges, the work can include transcribing not only people with non-native English accents, but speaking at a fast pace about places in countries like India, or giving names of Bollywood songs in Hindi and you are expected to Google these and transcribe them accurately. For me this was an enjoyable challenge, though it may not be to everyone's taste.
Cons
They provide a 'contract' but if the work runs out before the end of the contract period, too bad. They expect you to start work before you have received the contract and agreed to the conditions. Some of the work that you have to transcribe is sexually explicit, bordering on pornographic, but there is no forewarning of this. If you raise this as an issue you are told it is 'part of the job'. You are paid according to meeting a set number of utterances to be transcribed, but you are not told that when you receive a task containing, for example, 200 utterances that 5 of those may be considered 'golden' utterances and untranscribable. These are not counted towards your tally, but you don't know this until you receive a lower rate of pay than you were expecting at the end of the project. They don't supply enough work for you to meet the contract conditions unless you keep reminding them that you need more work, so you need to be on your toes about that. You need to keep your own careful records of tasks completed as they don't routinely provide evidence of that when they pay you. They had missed 3 tasks that I sent so I had to raise this with them to receive my money for those tasks.
