How a Gig Worker Revolt Begins

Rev started its own competitor in this realm earlier this year. In Friday's Q. and A., contractors asked if they were being kept around just to train the company's artificial intelligence -- something Mr. Chicola vehemently denied. So far at least, the machine-powered alternatives do not appear to be eating into the work available for skilled transcribers. Paula Kamen, who runs Transcription Professionals from her home near Chicago, said that when she began her company in 1995, she was convinced that Dragon -- the buzzy speech recognition software of that time -- would soon make her business obsolete. But she said she has continued to grow at a steady rate because the advances in speech recognition technology have come alongside the proliferation in recording devices and people wanting to see their words turned into text.