What the work involves
This is a single-task audio collection project, not an ongoing role. You receive a short script in English and a recording guide that specifies things like room conditions, distance from the microphone, file format, and how to handle mistakes. You read the script aloud in your own voice, check the recording for background noise and clipping, and upload it through AfterQuery's submission form. Most contributors finish in under fifteen minutes, including setup.
The speech data being collected is used to train and evaluate speech recognition and speech-processing systems on accented English. That is why the accent requirement is strict: the value of the dataset depends on the accent being genuinely yours. Performed or approximated Italian accents are rejected, and reviewers listening to hundreds of samples are generally good at hearing the difference.
What the platform screens for
- Whether Italian is your first language or a language you grew up speaking, and whether your English carries that influence naturally
- Whether you have a phone or computer with a working microphone and a quiet place to use it
- Whether you can read and act on written English instructions without back-and-forth support
- Basic reliability: reading the whole script, not skipping lines, submitting the correct file
Logistics and pay
Fully remote and fully asynchronous — there is no call, no scheduled session, and no supervision. Pay is stated by the platform as a flat $50 for one accepted recording submission; on a fifteen-minute task that works out to roughly the $30/hr band observed for this category, but the payment is per submission, not hourly, and is contingent on the recording passing quality review. Turnaround is short: these projects typically open and close within days, so responsiveness matters more than availability in hours. Repeat invitations sometimes follow for contributors whose first submission is clean, but nothing is promised.