Why the future of work is work from home

修订版is a company that transcribes audio files, captions and subtitles video, and translates documents. None of these are in and of themselves revolutionary business ideas, so you can forgive Founder and CEO Jason Chicola if he gushes over the company rolling out a new automated product, Temi. From the outside, it seems like the future is arriving.

“我们从试图Temi的Rev客户那里得到的典型反应是，对于他们的用例而言，质量太低。有少数人尝试一下，说：“这对我来说是完美的。”对于那些在具有良好声学的房间里慢慢讲话的人来说，这对他们来说是炸药。”

And if you thought that was a soft sell,客户收到了电子邮件公告大胆地说：“质量远低于Rev.”。对于杰森（Jason）来说，蒂米（Temi）不是游戏规则改变者。它不会改变我们进行对话的方式。这不是人工智能。这只是公司已经提供的服务的更糟糕的版本 - 尽管价格更快，而价格的十分之一。

This was, initially, puzzling. We had reached out to Jason to discuss Temi, and he quickly made it clear that Rev wasn’t about automation at all. In fact, if anything, Rev’s business model is a huge bet against the popular mythos that robots are going to replace workers. To the extent that the company has innovated, it has simply connected human labor with jobs that need to be done.

“ Rev的目标是在家庭工作中创造数百万个工作。这就是我们的存在。我们所做的一切都是为了促进这一任务。”杰森告诉我们。

“我是非常无亲的市场，我特别认为有意义的工作是人们实现幸福和目标的最佳方式。”因此，他的职业生涯大部分时间都在建立市场以吸引自由职业者。首先，作为大型自由市场的Odesk（现为UPWORK）的第三名员工，现在与Rev。

“这两家公司都在于让人们在家工作，并为人们提供经济机会。As a practical matter, this means letting people who typically didn’t go to an Ivy League school, or don’t live in New York or San Francisco, find work they really enjoy, and being able to make the most out of their skills and abilities.” In this article, Jason tells us about the philosophy behind Rev, the difference between selling labor and services, and how robots are not, in fact, coming to kill us all.

Measurable, Impactful, Repeated

REV从下注开始：在家工作的人数将继续增加。他们想促进这一点。从那里开始，这是一个缩小焦点的问题。

The most important thing to Jason was finding a niche where they would be able to get clean, objective data on whether or not they were getting results — call it the “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” problem.

“First, we looked for a service we could standardize. It couldn’t be something where judgment of quality is subjective, like logo design or software design. We wanted a clear answer as to whether we had delivered on what we’d promised to our customers.,” Jason tells us. With transcription services, either the words are written down correctly or they are not. Turnaround times leave even less room for interpretation.

Next, their service had to adapt to the marketplace.“For any business or marketplace, you need to have a lot of repeat usage. Repeat usage is essential,” Jason tells us. Obviously having people pay you multiple times is better than having them pay you once, but according to Jason, the ancillary benefits are arguably larger.

杰森说：“在一生的需求周围建立一个市场并不是一个很好的策略，因为客户永远不会互动，以为您提供真正需要使您的服务令人愉悦的反馈。”“我们有超过100,000个客户，其中很大一部分非常定期使用该服务。他们喜欢告诉我们所有有关他们的抓地力以及如何使转速更好的信息，因此我们不断改进我们的产品。没有这些反馈，我们将无法生存。”

Rev的创始策略是一种数据策略。有了可量化的目标和基于回头客的业务，Rev可以知道它是否达到了目标，如果没有达到目标，则可以透气到它可以成功的地方。碰巧的是，尽管翻译是他们最初的产品，但Rev迅速得知他们的转录业务更强大，并适应了这一现实。

“我们不出售劳动；我们出售服务”

在线招聘自由职业者可能是一个混合的袋子 - 一个让人想起的是Craigslist Grifters和内森为你-caliber work。Jason希望Rev的用户的经验是……不是。他希望它尽可能无摩擦。杰森告诉我们：“如果我们希望远程工作成为主流，那么平台应该进行招聘和管理，而不需要客户拥有该技能。”“我们仅提供服务，我们可以在其中保证输出质量。我们不出售劳动；我们出售服务。”

因此，定价很明显。用户要做的就是上传文件。几个小时后，除了上传文件后不久，收到了一封通知电子邮件，瞧。这是缺少的：选择谁完成工作，谈判以及在接收文件和收到成绩单之间发生的任何其他事情。所有这些发生在Rev结束时，客户的输入为零，他们不知道谁进行了转录，直到他们有机会在收到笔录后进行评估。

But in order to make a silent labor market function well, Rev has to be cognizant of the requirements of both parties: the freelance worker and the customer.

杰森说：“我认为Rev是一个托管市场。”“典型劳动力市场上的自由职业者花费大量时间申请工作。有几个问题。价格通常会以定价为底部。对于客户来说，很难分辨出高质量和低质量之间的差异。这意味着劳动力花费了很多时间，不仅要出售自己，而且还与不知道自己想要什么的客户打交道。自由职业者最终可能会遇到这样的情况，如果有人不知道如何要求他们需要什么，自由职业者可能会对整个项目感到沮丧。”

“当有人从事REV时，他们花费零时间来卖空。他们可以随时随地工作。他们从事的每项工作，都会为此报酬。他们不谈判费率。他们从事工作或没有工作。这会导致更高的生产率，因为它们只需要工作，而不是要自行营销，但也会带来更高的幸福感。我们从根本上相信，如果您真的很擅长自己的工作，则不必花时间卖掉自己。”

Why AI is not something to be afraid of

Despite using it in his products, Jason Chicola is not seeing the awesome, but job-destroying powers waiting to be unleashed by artificial intelligence: “When Elon Musk talks about how Skynet’s going to kill us, I think he’s trying to sell cars because it’s free media coverage. Now, maybe some people out there have this incredible artificial intelligence. I hope they do. I’m confident it can be used for good instead of evil, but what I see is pattern matching that doesn’t work very reliably.”

这似乎是一种令人沮丧的评估。毕竟，信号initially reached out to Jason to discuss a new product, Temi, another transcription service that costs one-tenth as much and delivers transcripts within minutes rather than hours. The catch? Temi is an automated software program, not a human doing the transcribing. And as Jason will happily tell you, that means Temi transcriptions are simply not as good as Rev ones.

杰森（Jason）并未将Temi中的技术视为替代转速，而是一种补充。人们会记录并抄录他们以前没有的东西，并接受成绩单不那么精确。那么，为什么要建造它呢？

根据杰森的说法，即使没有立即，明显的方法使工人更加有效，但它也会变得更加有效。在这种情况下，很容易想象一个工人可以通过像Temi那样指挥更大薪水的产品来扩大输出。从广义上讲，这是杰森（Jason）为泰米（Temi）看到的未来，而不是完全取代工人的机器。

“这是违反直觉的。我会说，我可能会在旧金山经过的10个人中有9个人会说：‘哦，您是一家技术公司，正在进行转录吗？Well, clearly you must automate everything or automate most things.’ If we thought that’s what customers wanted, we would have done it, but we haven’t because the technology has generally been not good enough and is unlikely to improve to that point anytime soon.”

至于在语音识别中，替换该功能中人类的技术是否临近，就机器学习而言，这一领域是相当先进的 - 杰森非常怀疑。“我认为，公众对人工智能的状况以及其中的某些事情的有效性。我们距离自动驾驶汽车有18个月的路程。

“The people that I’ve met that are most optimistic about speech recognition have been undergraduates in computer science programs. The people that I’ve met that are the least optimistic about the technology are the ones that work on it the most.”

炒作被夸大了。杰森说：“大多数所谓的人工智能可能会更准确地称为机器学习，从模式中学习。”“If I say a word like ‘coffee’ 100 times, and you say ‘coffee’ 100 times, and someone else says ‘coffee’ 100 times, and someone else says a word that might or might not be ‘coffee,’ a machine can actually be pretty good at knowing, did he or did he not say ‘coffee?’ If I’m talking about the history of the Civil War, and I’m talking about who won a battle and what happened next, that computer listening to it is not going to compare this to a database of how the Civil War played out, and be able to know that after Battle X, Battle Y happened. It’s not intelligent in the way that a 12-year-old who has some context is.” Jason doesn’t see this contextual failure as a problem machines are going to be able to overcome quickly.

毕竟，Rev雇用了来自北美的大多数转录者，因为那是他们的客户所在。这样，他们就可以从相同的教育系统中获得文化背景，正确拼写“颜色”一词，观看相同的电视节目以及北美地区所带来的其他一切，并且共享的背景使转录者可以填补当他们听到录音中的东西时，在差距中。如果英国人在适应美国背景下很难，那么计算机肯定也会。杰森说：“填补了空白，这是一种截然不同的思维方式，‘听起来意味着什么？’”杰森说。

So count Jason Chicola as an AI skeptic for now.

快速移动

“As the founder of a company, what’s most important is the velocity of ideas that we’re trying, and when we see the data, that we’re honest,” Jason tells us. It’s a variation on a familiar theme: be lean. Move fast, break things. But it’s a philosophy at Rev. “The key to success is not being right every time, but it’s making a lot of thoughtful bets and being objective about figuring out which ones work, and which ones don’t and not caring about winning the bet.”

对于像Rev这样的公司而言，快速的一个关键方面是使实验简单，因为简单地说明了。

“作为一家公司，现在我们有八个产品团队。在任何时候，每个团队都有一个指标，他们试图在三到六个月内移动。该指标几乎总是与客户或工人的幸福联系在一起。这使我们可以对客户说：“我们正在尝试在一半的时间内为您提供成绩单。”保持简单的功能很好。当我们真正成功的事情时，我们可以问为什么它起作用，如果它没有成功，我们可以调查为什么不这样做。我们总是专注于这一过程，因此我们不会沉迷于失败。”杰森说。

修订版is a company built on a simple idea: more people are going to work from home, and they’re going to facilitate and accelerate that process. Right now that means transcribing, captioning, subtitling, and everything else, but in the future, who knows? “We aspire to be like the Amazon of from-home work, and we think of transcription like they do of books: the first business that they nailed, and the formula for everything came after.” Whether the company can meet these grand ambitions is impossible to say. But in the end, when the story of Rev is told, they’ll be there to transcribe it.