Non-Music Generalist Annotator

About the Role

We are seeking detail-oriented Non-Music Generalist Annotators to support an audio captioning project involving English speech transcription, speaker identification, voice description, sound-event annotation, and audio quality review.

Key Responsibilities

• Writing: Write natural, fluent English descriptions using precise and concise vocabulary to characterize voices and sounds.
• Speaker Tracking: Attribute speech to the correct speaker, including during overlaps, interruptions, and group conversations. Identify when a new speaker enters.
• Transcription: Accurately transcribe English speech, including repetitions, fillers, and names. Recognize different English accents and identify speech in other languages.
• Voice Description: Describe voice characteristics and changes in pitch, voice quality, loudness, pace, emotion, and intonation. Compare speakers based on audible characteristics rather than the meaning of their words.
• Non-Speech Vocalizations: Identify, distinguish, count, and timestamp vocal sounds such as laughter, coughing, sneezing, sobbing, gasping, and breathing.
• Environmental Sound Annotation: Identify and describe non-speech sounds by texture, onset, distance, and relative loudness. Distinguish individual sound events from continuous background ambience.
• Sound Prominence: Identify prominent and masked sounds and track changes in their relative prominence, including when music begins, ends, or is replaced.
• Scene Authenticity: Assess whether voices and sounds belong to the original recorded scene or appear to be added, such as narration, playback, or background music.
• Timing Accuracy: Precisely identify event onsets and offsets, speaker changes, overlapping speech, and gradual transitions.
• Machine-Generated Draft Review: Review machine-generated annotations for missing, invented, mistimed, or incorrectly attributed content. Base corrections on audible evidence rather than video content, subject matter, or the draft itself.

Qualifications and Skills

• Bachelor’s degree or above.
• Background in linguistics, voice analysis or coaching, or audio production is preferred.
• Excellent English comprehension and natural, native-level English writing ability.
• Strong auditory attention and the ability to distinguish speakers, vocalizations, and environmental sounds.
• Ability to transcribe speech faithfully and produce clear, accurate audio descriptions.
• Strong attention to detail, especially for timing, speaker attribution, overlapping speech, and sound-event identification.