Rev

They have you go thru this long application process, only to ignore you. Even if you do get work with them, you won't be paid what you're worth.

You make maybe 1-2 dollars an hours. Files are hard and if you don't do them perfectly, meaning you could mishear because you're human, you get downgraded and may lose your job. Stressful. Fear inducing. Crazy. Also, they expect you to listen to files full of foreign language and singing, which we can't transcribe. So you listen to a five minute file of singing, and you tell them it's untranscribable and get paid zero for this. This company is unethical. THEY USE AND ABUSE anyone who is willing to work for peanuts. Half of peanuts.

Their actual turnaround times are always at least twice what they tell you. And when they fail to deliver as promised (99% accuracy for good quality audio, delivery within a quoted turnaround time, failure of transcriptionist to follow style guide) they always refuse to refund your money. Most of their customer service agents have been patronizing, one was dishonest, and one told me that if I was going to keep insisting the company provide services as advertised, I needed to stop using them. I had already chosen another company by that point, though. In my photo, note the time I placed the order (11:41 am), the time I took the screenshot (3:03 pm), and the turnaround time (4 to 13 hrs). It takes the average transcriptionist 1 hr to transcribe 20 minutes of audio, not 7.5 to 16.5 hours.

Everyone says to go here and apply but I think their website is broken. I cannot apply or access. I write a different review once this works.

Rev.com does not email me the finished product (burnt in captions on videos) and does not give access to the finished product on their website.

In order to get your finished product, please be prepared to spend an extra 30 minutes jumping through their automated customer service bot before reaching a person and waiting for them to email it to tell you it's your fault (it's not, it's them), and grudgingly send you your completed project manually.

Every time.

You will get every email but the completed project you paid for. And you will never get access to your purchase (if it's burnt in captions) on the website itself. By design.

Guess they like to keep their customer service people busy.

I placed an order for a human to type and was told the turn around would be 6 days which seemed kind of long for what they were charging me... less than a few hours later I received a email stating that the order was going to take longer than the anticipated 6 days?
I said cancel the order and transfer it the "kinda sorta correct " AI format for less cost and quicker computer generated turn around.
Thats when it was apparent that this company is a bs scam site.
They would not switch it and amazingly said that my document was now in progress and they could not switch or cancel anything.
They then gave me a $20 credit and I still have no document 3 days later.
This scam company should give a anticipated hard finished product date... give the consumer the option of that time line working before charging you, since they are less than reasonable.
Will never use this BS site again!

I completed 18 jobs for Rev with consistently high, near perfect scores.
You can see this in the photo I've uploaded. (Grade 5 is the highest score)
When I asked for a review of the scoring on my last job, my account was deactivated with no warning.
They then adjusted my last score heavily downwards.
Payment is very low and does not meet even minimum wage.
The captioning work is tedious and time consuming.
There are stringent deadlines for completion imposed.
You compete with other 'Revvers' for jobs that are often poor standard and with low quality audio.
I viewed the work as like having a challenging puzzle to solve.
It was interesting to see the variety of videos uploaded for captioning.
Things like children's cartoons, business promotions and even explicit content.
It would be hard to earn more than $7 per hour doing this work.
I am yet to see any of the $70 I earned.
Considering this abhorrent treatment of their workers, and the fact that I can no longer access my account, I am not optimistic about payment.

Really disappointed. They make it as difficult as possible to work with them. Bad system to pay them... impossible to get in touch with them... don't waste your time.

They deactivated my account without telling me why. They sent this message:

Your Rev account has been deactivated due to quality reasons that are unrelated to your current metrics.

One or more of the following reasons applies:

Multiple instances of negative customer feedback on your submissions that were validated by our internal review.
Multiple scores that were considered not customer-ready.
Multiple projects sent to be redone.
Internal standards review of your account indicated significant quality concerns.
You will be compensated for any completed jobs prior to your account being deactivated. For general questions, please refer to Deactivated Accounts FAQ.

This decision is final. We wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

---This does not make any sense at all. There weren't any complaints about my work. This website is a scam to get free labor so that they can deactivate you right before you reach the status you've been working countless hours to achieve.

Despite what they tell you, they will use non-English speakers to do the transcript and they are mostly using AI to do it. If you have multiple speakers, your transcript will be a disaster. Trust me on this one.

There is a reason why Rev prices are lower than other service providers.

As a transcriptionist, these people will STEAL your time, STEAL your talent, underpay you and treat you like dirt. As a worker, you are easily replaceable and nothing but a number to them.

They will ask you to listen to files without being paid, which easily amount to a few hours a week if you're working full-time, as if all the preparation work involved didn't count for anything.

99% of the files come without glossary. You will do a lot of research, for free. If you work tirelessly and as fast as you can, you will barely make 7$ an hour. But remember, that's only if you're very good at it, and if you have months of practice under your belt.

You're not an employee, you're a so-called independent contractor, meaning there is not benefit for you and they can cut off your access to the platform whenever they want. They don't owe you anything. You give them your time for years, as I have, and you will be denied access for a misunderstanding, without having anyone to talk to. All they want is your underpaid labor. They will milk it until you're utterly exhausted, and then you will feel like an absolute fool.

This is modern slavery at its finest. As a transcriptionist, you are feeding AI and helping Rev become better at voice recognition, so they can then profit from commercializing new software, enriching people at the top, helping them replace people by machines as quickly as they can.

Now, I'm assuming that if you are a client, they are okay. I can't be sure, because they clearly allow just about anyone to rate the jobs, so who knows, they probably sometimes give 5 ratings at random even if the work is awful, but I wouldn't know.

I spent a week there, it's not uncommon for they to pay you a fifth part of what they are charging the client, for literally doing all the job, they are not taking a commission out of your hard work, they are giving you a commission out of your hard work, and you know it, they are not making you work at gunpoint. That still doesn't make it okay.

I don't think they deserve the work of the workers who are actually trying to do a good job, and I condone anyone who's doing a mediocre job. But, the way I see it, if I'm going to spend my time doing a job, I might as well do the best job I can, even if it's an unfair place, so that's what I did. The highest rate there is 5, if your average goes below 4.5 they delete your account, there's nothing wrong with that, but their so called standards are no standards at all. As I said, they let just about anyone rate you, they don't rate you themselves, that's a akin to the teacher making your dumb classmates rate you and then not making sure, not caring in the slightest, about you getting a fair review or not.

They should at least let the client rate you, that would make sense. I know for sure that I did a great job, that they handed my good job to the client, that they made good money out of me, and yet, dumb people were rating me at random. Sometimes I would get a 5 for a job that was good and did deserve the 5 but, because of how hard it was, it wasn't as a good as something else, yet that something else would get a 3 for absolutely no reason, the people rating it would just make up the most stupid excuses, my guess is that they don't want anyone else taking the good audio files from them so they just try to get your account deleted, and since it's random, if you are lucky you can probably stay there for years, above 4.5 as long as the 3 loving people don't find you too often. The guys that rate you love giving you 3s at random.

So called standards, because in order to have standards you need to actually pay people what they deserve, and to make sure that the people rating the workers are competent at rating, it's that simple. And OK, you stay because you need the job, and they do you a favor by closing your account for no reason, because you can't stay even if you wanted to, you are now free from their dehumanizing behavior and from making the owner richer for literally doing all the job yourself, BUT what is not okay at all, is that I spent all night working on something, because as I said, I was doing a great job, so I would spend about six hours on a single task, I always finished it on time, they paid me for it, but then, three hours later they deleted my account and decided that for some reason it made total sense to STEAL the money they had just paid me.

That's my problem, that's what my title's about. So, I hope the poor owner one day finally has enough money to afford his groceries, if he needs to steal from his already underpaid workers.
And no, they didn't steal my money because it was a bad job, it had been unfairly rated as a 4 out of 5, but that never stopped them from paying me in the past, it was solely because for some crazy reason they believe is perfectly okay to steal your money, on top keeping all the money you are producing by doing all the job. Apparently not enough, they have to steal too. Because my time isn't worth a thing, right? Because I had nothing better to do with my night than work for them for free, so they could get paid by the client for my hard work anyway, right? One of the most shameless business I've ever seen, I would never hire their services knowing what's going on there. I don't even know how their business has been legal for years.

And I'm not entirely sure, but watch out for Trustpilot, Rev has a 4.6 there, and when I tried to leave this review, the confirmation code to post it would magically never arrive to my email no matter how many codes I kept asking, there was no way to leave my one star review, maybe that's the reason they are rated that high with them, just allow a handful of bad reviews so you don't seem that fishy, but stop most of them. Rev certainly has the money to pay for that kind of questionable service with all the money it steals from their workers.

They scam transcribers out of their ability to make any decent money. When you are paid $2 for a project that takes you hours to do due to terrible audio quality and when you must score nothing but perfect score in order to get better gigs, you know this company definitely doesn't have your best interest in mind. Steer clear of Rev. There are better options.

I was a teacher looking for something to keep me busy and to make a bit of extra money over the summer because the summer program I used to teach for was cancelled due the pandemic. I found Rev on a list of "summer jobs for teachers," and I am sorry that I ever did. I am a 55-year-old English professor who has taught writing and editing for nearly 30 years. I Googled "summer jobs for teachers" and "editing jobs," and Rev came up. I took a grammar test and experimented with the software and thought transcription, while not "editing," might be a good fit for me.

Little did I know then that a transcriptionist has little to do with proper language, grammar, usage, and so on, and everything to do with good hearing and the ability to decipher gibberish and unintelligible audio submitted by people who are too lazy to type their own notes.

Rev is also the antithesis of every teaching philosophy I've ever read or used in my own career. For example, Revvers are "graded" by freelance Revvers who are apparently good enough at transcribing that they can judge others' work. The scale is 1-5, but you have to maintain a whopping 4.5 to continue working for Rev. In the teaching world, that's a B+ average. Keep in mind that this is just to keep the job. "Grades" are cloaked in useless comments called "feedback." One grader gave me a 1 because I – following the customer's lead – labeled a speaker by his shirt. This same customer had labeled speakers "dark green polo," "dark blue button up," and so on in a video I had just finished transcribing. But when I labeled a speaker "male short sleeved shirt" on the next job for the same customer, I was given a 1. My "metrics" obviously fell below 4.5.

Rev graders will tell you that all grades are based on Rev's "style guide." I have taught copyediting for years and I can tell you that Rev's guide is not a style guide. MLA, APA, AP, Chicago, etc. all publish style guides. Aside from telling Revvers when to spell out a number and when to use a numeral, the Rev guide is 20 pages of rules and Rev policies that will then be used to grade Revvers harshly and, eventually, to deactivate (aka "fire") them.

In my case, my metrics fell below Rev's coveted 4.5 on a Thursday and I received a warning email. I worked most of the day Friday to bring up my metrics. However, late Saturday night I received another email that I had been deactivated. That means they fired a 30-year veteran English professor. In all, I worked for Rev for two weeks. The constant emails with my "grades" were demoralizing and humiliating, and anyone deserves more than two days to improve their work.

If all of this was a trade-off for decent pay, some might think the process worthwhile. Our parents taught us that if something sounds too good to be true, then it is too good to be true, and nowhere is this more so than with Rev. Don't let them fool you with the glamour of working from home in your pajamas. We taught through a pandemic, so we know how much fun it is to work from home. Don't let them fool you, either, with promises that as you become a better Revver you'll make more money. After my 45 minutes of training, hundreds of jobs did open to me. However, many of them paid 50 cents or less per minute of transcription (as low as 31 cents) and much of the audio was so bad that I couldn't possibly transcribe efficiently. And when they say they pay by the minute, they mean the minutes of the audio recording, not the minutes that you spend working. Most jobs took me between twice as long and four times as long as the audio because I constantly had to pause, rewind, listen again and again, and try to decipher who was speaking and what they were saying. So a 10-minute project suddenly became anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour and a half of my time. When my accuracy rating fell to 4.4, below Rev's minimum of 4.5, my account was deactivated and I was no longer able to work for Rev. At that point, I had worked a total of 250 minutes and 55 seconds and had earned $158.32. Keep in mind that those four hours (250 minutes) were the length of the audio files, not the time I worked. So if I worked, say, 12 hours, I made $13/hour, which is less than minimum wage in some states.

The quality of the audio was another problem. One audio I transcribed was two heavily-accented people talking while a crew was felling trees in the background. Yes: felling trees. In other cases, people talked over each other, talked through noisy locations like a boiler room, or talked so fast that I couldn't understand them. Rev's software can't transcribe these poor audio files, but Rev expects human transcribers to be correct 90% of the time. It's worth noting the good work that I did. Of 24 jobs, 18 were graded. Of those 18, I earned 10 perfect 5's; five rankings of 4; two 3's; and a 2; I earned the 1 on "formatting," not accuracy. Accuracy is why I was deactivated.

My fellow teachers (and anyone, really), all of this is to say: if you want to occupy your time and make a bit of extra money over the summer, then tutor. Or just apply for a job at your local Six Flags amusement park. You'll have a wear a silly uniform and they might (though it's unlikely) assign you to the most degrading of jobs like cleaning the restrooms. But you won't be "graded" (aka, demoralized and humiliated) by an invisible "Revver" and you can go home feeling good about yourself and your value in the workforce.

One bad score is enough for these clowns to deactivate your account. They pay, at most, is ~$4 an hour for tedious and monotonous work. They expect perfection for terrible compensation.

I was hired and my account was closed after less than a week for receiving one bad grade. What a joke this company is. Stay away and don't waste your time.

I get an email advising that I have gone below the metrics. One point by the way due to two graded files given the lowest points. Mind you most of my files graded were 4/5 and 5/5. The warning says I have 120 days to not go below the standards again or my account would be deactivated, which I received on the 16th. Today I receive and email in the middle of transcribing a file saying that my metrics have gone below again and of you know what happens. I'm looking at both emails and guess what, metrics are exactly the same. I even go back and look at all the files graded since the warning email and nothing has dropped. I contact them and they say it's irreversible even though I'm telling them something isn't right. They don't even take the time to check and see if their system, that made the decision, made a mistake. I wouldn't even care if the system made a mistake the fact that didn't want to check is what bothers me. Also the fact that they don't have a better option than firing you right off back is crazy. How about try more training first before just deactivating someone's account. Not that I really need it because like I said I was getting 4/5 and 5/5 grades at least 90% of the time.

Rev.com hypes great rates for doing transcription. They give you some easy to understand samples with one or two speakers, no background noise whatever, and a brief recording time. You complete these, get paid, then you get the real assignments.

You will see an assignment with 4-5 people or more speaking that has been accepted and put back in the pool multiple times. You will get assignments with people with nearly indecipherable accents, and in some cases the transcription assignments appear to be private conversations that do not appear to have full consent of all parties. In some cases, the calls are coming from an inmate at a corrections facility.

In addition, a great many of the assignments give only a limited time frame to get them done, and you are not paid for the time you worked on the assignments, only when they're completed. Don't waste your time.

I hired them for a simple two page translation. They asked me to add additional services for a certified translation. I explained I don't need a certified translation and to proceed with the standard translation I paid in advance for.
They ignored my instructions and have not delivered the translation I paid in advanced for claiming the additional fee for the additional service I rejected.
Their customer service obviously chooses to ignore emails and they are not available to answer calls on Saturday. So I guess I will have to take time during work hours to deal with them. Next time I am working with local translators who respect the estimate and client instructions.
SCAM! Steer clear!

I was pretty hyped to start doing online audio transcriptions, as I am a pretty fast and accurate typist, and I can do this from home! Going in, Rev gives you a couple "training" videos, which are actually just you transcribing short, challenging audios, with them popping up "tips" here and there. You are given 100 audio minutes to prove that you are able to transcribe accurately, and you are graded after each piece of work you do to that endeavor, even the training videos. You can be scored between 1-5,5 being "near perfect". You get your sores after each audio you transcribe, along with about 50 thousand other email "reminders" to tell you that your work is below average (even when all your scores are 5's), and to remind you of late work (even when over an hour remains until the deadline). It's a LOT of emailing. My biggest issue is, after a week of busting my hump on audio transcriptions (I'm talking 4 hours+ to transcribe a single 20 minute audio file), and scoring 5's the entire time, I still got terminated after my 100 hours claiming my scores didn't measure up to their standards. Again, I scored 5's on all of my work, which is the highest score you can have, and somehow they averaged all 5's to be JUST under the 4.5 mark... and here's the kicker; there is no way to dispute your score. My account was terminated ASAP. I was unable to login, and I was unable to ask about or dispute my score. Once you become one of their transcriptions (assuming that's actually possible), they claim you have access to more jobs, and higher wages, however I believe that this is a SCAM, to get cheap transcription work. I was indeed paid for the 100 hours I did transcribe, however it was at the minimum pay amount despite my perfect 5 scoring. They pay you through paypal, without fees. I am tempted to start a second trial account, in order to determine if I would be terminated again after another 100 perfect hours, but at the same time I am trying to tell myself that it wasn't me, that it's just a crappy company. It sucks to work so hard on something only to be told you aren't good enough with CONSTANT email reminders telling you that you are below their average transcription standard, especially when you are literally scoring the highest possible score for accuracy AND formatting. You also have to fight for audio files to transcribe. One or two will pop up every hour or so and you have to basically sit and constantly refresh the page, and race to be the first to "claim" it. The instruction manual instructs you to carefully preview the audio file before claiming it, to determine if it's within your ability range (accents, bad audio quality, etc), but do not do that. You just grab and go; and if you miss it, you're out of luck until the next one pops up. There are also VERY conflicting instructions. You are given a manual to read that explains their formatting procedure, and what words to omit, etc. however some of the people grading your work have graded me incorrectly (they put notes in your grades on what you did wrong, if anything), such as, you should have used a hyphen rather than an ellipses, even when the manual tells you to use an ellipses in that situation (small errors in small quantities will not apparently affect your scoring). They also send you a mandatory quiz about halfway through your training hours, to see how you are doing, and they give you tips and answers in the quiz which actually do NOT coincide with what the manual says. They literally set you up to fail by giving you completely conflicting instructions. I did enjoy their intuitive UI used for the transcribing, however. Keyboard commands to insert timestamps, and to back up the audio; to pause and play with just keystrokes makes for quicker work, however I cannot get passed the idea that Rev is scamming you (while shaming you) for cheap transcription work before they drop you and move on to another. Don't waste your time.

Treats their transcriptionists horribly
Transcriptionist (Former Employee), Home Based May 30,2017
Cons: No communication
This company hires transcriptionists. But if there is an issue, they make sure they are not reachable. They literally have other transcriptionist grading your work. And if these other transcriptionists make an error in grading your work, they let you go. They do not return phone calls. They do not return emails. Apparently that is how they do business. They have no problem taking calls from potential clients, but those who work for them they could care less about

I have no idea why this company is still in business- probably because of the millionaire morons who invested in these crooks. This company digusts me. The quality of their work is a joke. They constantly lie. They are not interested in producing a good product- just collecting as much money as they can from you. From reading numerous reviews, they pay their contractors (the ones doing the work that you pay Rev for), get paid below minimum wage. I know that the transcription/captioning industry pays very low as a whole, but Rev pays the worst and fires their contractors for no reason or for made up reasons. This company is terrible. I hope they go bankrupt.

I tried applying to Rev several times, went through their lengthy application process and everything, only to be denied. I tried contacting them and they wouldn't give me a single reason why I was denied! I tried this several times, as I stated, and every time it's the same thing. Oddly enough, my wife and her friends applied and every single one of her friends were hired. Seems to me like Rev is prejudiced against men. Avoid this company like the plague! There are plenty other sites out there that actually let people work for them, Rev isn't one of them.