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Comment by Caligula | Hacker News Reader

Wow this is expensive. Over a dollar a word. "what time is it" costs 6$.

I actually looked into their other company, voice123 to do some audio corpus building for a speech recognition project but it was way cheaper(though painful) to just use amazon turk.

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Smaller jobs imply larger overhead; you're testing an edge case.

Estimating "quick recordings" of some random strings in their calculator I see roughly: 5 words for $8, 100 words for $35, 200 words for $45, 800 words for $70, 3200 words for $160 (~$0.05/word).

Sexy. Thanks - I was wondering this. :)

whoa... interesting... did it work out? I mean could you crowdsource voice recognition? In the case of voicebunny words are cheaper on longer texts so you could probably get a better price for reads that are in the thousands of words range. Of course, in here you will pay higher prices for higher quality

I needed to build a audio corpus to train acoustic models on. It actually worked pretty good. I was able to build up about 100 hours worth. It was unbelievably tedious because I had to verify the audio even after I used amazon turk a second time to do a first verification pass.

The other thing is that I don't necessarily want perfect quality audio. I wanted whatever microphone audio normal people have so it probably worked out better that I used amazon turk.

Very interesting, I´m thinking that voicebunny would be useful to these types of projects because you can ask recordings on specific language accents.

Also Voicebunny also has a quality check and a guarantee included in the service.

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