Rev addresses pay shift, grading anxiety, and AI fears (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hey everybody, I think we just kicked off this first ever YouTube live stream. I'm sitting in front of someone else's computer, it's full of things I don't understand. I'm hopeful that it works. Please forgive us if there's any technical difficulties, although we have a very competent team here and I'm hopeful that it's going to work out okay. For those of you that either can't hear this or if you're friends that can't make it or if you can't finish it, we're going to make sure that this video is posted on our channel forever so you can hear it anytime if you like and if you guys find it helpful, we will do this again in the future. Waiting to get the final formal green light for me to dive into our messages. I want to make sure that everything is working technically.

[00:00:43] Speaker 2: Do you want to do a quick introduction, Jason? You can introduce yourself and I'll introduce myself.

[00:00:49] Speaker 1: Yeah, are we good to go? We're good to go. Yeah, so Ry, why don't you first introduce yourself?

[00:00:56] Speaker 2: Okay, hi everybody. Ry Schuller. I'm Ry Rev on the forums, the community manager that started here a couple months ago here at Rev.

[00:01:04] Speaker 1: Thanks, Ry. Ry has, we think, already done a nice job improving the forum and a lot more work to do on communication here. Guys, I'm Jason Ciccola. I'm the founder. I started the company nine years ago, you know, my apartment in San Francisco. I live now in Austin, Texas where we have an office as well. And this is the first time we've ever done a communication over live video. So it's a new thing for us in a lot of ways. You know, boy and hindsight, I really wish we had done this, you know, earlier on a happier day with better, you know, with better kind of context. But let me just first dive into the matter at hand. Obviously, I sent the email yesterday and posted in the forum. I'm hoping some of you or most of you have been able to read it. So let me talk a little bit about, you know, how I'm thinking about the present situation. And then I'll go into some of the things we're going to work on. And then Ry is going to ask some of the most popular questions he heard. And I will do my best to answer them over the next hour. You know, there are some times, I think, in life where I felt like I know what I'm doing and everything is sort of running as planned. And I think the last week has been probably in my whole life the first time where I felt like I didn't know what I was doing and we weren't maybe doing things quite right. So it's really been an eye opener. And there's been this big, to me, the hard thing to grapple with has been there's been this almost conflict I felt between when I walk around our office and I see everybody working on products and, you know, for customers and revers, I see a lot of good intentions. And that I know with certainty that we're sincere about trying to create a great platform for work. And when I hear a lot of the anger that I've heard, particularly last week, it's clear that a lot of people have felt we haven't had good intentions. And that's hard for me to hear. And I've had to really ask myself, you know, what did we miss and what did we get wrong? And what I realized, I figured out a couple areas where we've screwed up. And I'm going to tell you what I think those are. And then I'll talk to you about what we're going to do about it. I'd like to delete out. And the last thing I'll say is that we have a large community. Some of you guys have seen, I think we've announced on our website, we have 40,000 people working in a month. And not everyone's the same, to say the least. Not only are there different services, like transcription and captions and subtitles, but there's different levels. Revver, Revver Plus. And, you know, if we interview a group of rookies, we're screwing Revver Plus, we hear different concerns. Right. So I'm going to address this to the group that I believe is the most upset. And I think largely rightfully, which is, you know, Revver Plus who were in the habit of claiming, you know, what we refer to in our email as the easier jobs, jobs that typically were shorter, in most cases with cleaner audio. And to them, my main message is, I apologize. I'm sorry that we were insensitive. I think I now realize we were insensitive in the way we made this price change. We were moving fast in response to customer feedback. And for the reasons I laid out in the email, I'm confident that our customers need better people to do their harder work. But I think we rolled it out stupidly and didn't give people time to understand that, as I mentioned, we should have sent an email out weeks in advance and it was stupid that we didn't. There's no good reason. We were just moving fast and there wasn't a lot of thought put in and there should have been a lot of thought put in because we really asked ourselves, why did why did we miss this? What did we get wrong? And I think that my assumptions about how Revver Plus worked weren't correct. And I think it's because of the second thing that I want to apologize for, which is that I'm sorry that we haven't listened enough. And I'll tell you what I mean by that in a moment. But it used to be my impression that Revvers, particularly Revver Plus, were willing to claim a wide range of jobs, including easier ones and harder ones, and it just depended on what they were in the mood for that day. And we were under the impression that if we moved some pay from one job to the other, that people would mind doing the harder jobs. And clearly we were very wrong about that. That because I think we haven't listened well enough, we didn't realize how much anxiety had grown over our grading system. And that anxiety put people in a position we don't want to put them in. You know, when I think about what anybody would want in a job, you want to know that if you do a good job, the company is going to do right by you. You know, the words that have been in my head as we've been thinking about this have been, if you pay your dues, I want you to feel that Rev has your back. What do I mean by paying your dues? If you do good work for a long time for a lot of customers, the company should rightfully be grateful to you and you should feel secure in your position. And the fact that we let our grading system kind of go off the rails and it's in a place now that no one at Rev thinks it's in a good place. We all think it's kind of a disaster. And that is something that makes your jobs worse, particularly if you claim these harder jobs. So I think it was our bad to not appreciate that earlier. And again, I think it's because we haven't listened well enough. I mean, so why haven't we listened well enough? I can tell you the reasons and they're probably lousy excuses, but it's the truth. So I'll just tell you what the reasons were. The reasons are that most of what we do is try to steer our engineers and our product people to work on what we think are the biggest problems. And over the last few years, I think you guys probably know what we've worked on. We've tried to use AI and software to make you all more productive and help people earn more. And we've spent years investing in these tools that are mostly called Lime. And we've heard from a lot of you that they've been a big help for many of you guys in your productivity. But what it's meant is that we haven't focused on all the myriad other issues you guys have, which can sometimes be more important even in productivity. And again, like I said, that we haven't listened enough. We're going to put in place some new approaches to make sure we listen in more ways. The forum is a great way to listen. Rai, you know, maybe his title should be Chief Listener because, you know, my perspective is that his job is to make sure that I and the other folks at Rev who can direct resources know what you all are feeling. And we have their finger on the pulse. So listening to the forum is going to be, we've always listened, but we can do a better job. Rai is going to make sure that when you all are frustrated with something, he's going to pound the table and get in our face and make sure we deal with it sooner than in the past. I think we've let too many issues sit for a long time. And as I've been going through all the emails I've received and talking with Revvers, what I realized is that people, many of you guys feel ignored, that some of you guys have been citing a real problem that's very fixable for a long time and has not been fixed. And I mentioned one example, the anxiety over grading has been mentioned a lot and we haven't fixed it. And that probably feels, it's quite frustrating to keep reporting an issue when we haven't fixed it. You know, two other issues I'll mention that I learned about recently. I thought that when we rolled out this Ask an Expert feature, we were being very responsive and helping Revvers get quick answers to the questions. And in the last week, I had a couple of people tell me that they're not getting responses. And I was shocked. And I got an email yesterday from Directly, which is the service we use to deliver that, that says the median response time for responses was 3.6 minutes. Apparently, it's ignoring the fact that a lot of things aren't getting answered. And that's an embarrassment. I'm embarrassed. The people are asking questions and they're not getting responses. If you're doing a job and you have an issue, you should get a response and are bad that it's not. So when I leave this meeting, I'm going to make sure that we figure out why people aren't getting responses. We'll make sure you're getting responses, you know, quickly, as fast as possible, because we want you to get an answer so you can finish the job and not sit there in limbo, which I think by definition sucks. Beyond that, there's a ton of little problems, I think, in the Revro experience that we really ought to fix. And, you know, we're going to free up more engineering resources to tackle them. So that way we can have some teams working on our tooling and others working on these problems that some of them are small from an engineering perspective, but may be a big thing in your life. I've seen a couple of people recently tell me that Line, I believe, has a dark background and they want a white background. And some people are getting eyestrain. Somebody told me this morning that they have to stop working because their eyes are hurting from looking at Line. And I thought, that's freaking crazy. We should just let you switch the colors. And we can do it. We just haven't done it because we're focused on other stuff. And so I think we haven't been sufficiently responsive to your needs in the right time. And I'm sorry about that. We are sincere about being better at listening. So I mentioned how we are using the forum. We've always used the forum. We're going to use the forum better to listen. But that's only the start. Last week, for the first time ever, we had a formal official meetup for Revvers at our office here in Texas. We had a nice turnout and I met a bunch of people there and learned a lot. Later that week, a group of folks at Rev had lunch with some Revvers in Utah, near the Salt Lake City area, and we learned a lot there as well. In the early days of Rev, people were scattered so far all over the globe, it would have been hard to get two people in the same place, but now we have a lot of Revvers in a lot of cities. And so I expect to do more meetups as much as possible. I would hope that we can do a meetup in at least 10 or 15 of the largest metro areas over the next year so that those of you who want to have a voice can come and talk to Rev employees and let us know the things that you think we should know about how we can make the job better and we'll do our best. I mean, the caveat here is that we're always going to have more good ideas than we have resources to solve them. But what we'll do and what we try to do is to prioritize. And that's part of what Rye does. When Rye hears the issues, he kind of counts. And when he hears an issue 38 times, that goes to the top of the list. So we're going to give you guys more ways to speak up and we're going to have more ways to listen, starting with meetups that are in person. And we did two last week, so we think it's important. The last thing I want to apologize for is that we haven't communicated enough. We've been communicating the way we always communicated, which was frankly never that great. And we're bigger than we used to be, a lot of people out there. And what I'm realizing now is that when we don't proactively get out there and talk about where we're headed as a company, folks let fears creep in. Folks assume the worst. I hear, I read stuff in the forum like, Rev is running out of money. Rev's going to go out of business. Rev is trying to get my job, get rid of my job. Rev is trying to automate my job away. Rev is trying to slash my pay because they're greedy. I hear a lot of things that are not true. And if we don't, I guess if we're not out there enough talking about the issues, some of you guys are going to understand we think that maybe these things are true and we're just embarrassed to talk about it, which is the furthest thing from the truth. I'm confident that if, I think for most of you guys, if you simply, if you could walk through this door that's right here and walk through our office and talk to some of our employees, what I think you'd find is that we have some salespeople that are trying to get customers to bring more work. We have some engineers that are working on features that customers and Revvers have asked for. I think you'd find that people here are really trying to build the best place to work online. And we're taking a long-term view about how to make the job better for Revvers two, three, four years from now, and likewise, how we can make the customer experience better two, three, four years from now. That's what I think you'd find if we let you into Rev headquarters, but we clearly can't do that for 40,000 people who live in different places. And so it's up to us to get out there, get our message out there. And that's why I'm sitting here on YouTube right now, because the old ways, the occasional forum post weren't enough. We're going to try new methods to communicate. I'm going to try others. I'm hopeful that this live thing will be helpful. And, you know, want input. Certainly the meetup's another place. You know, the meetup, I can probably meet a few people a month, not 40,000, but we'll do our best to listen there as well. So better communication, better listening, that's going to be part of, you know, how we get better and grow going forward. So a bunch of the questions I got in email, my email in the last, you know, 18 hours that I made that post have, well, first of all, they've been full of helpful suggestions. Many of the suggestions are around things that we either are working on or more likely want to work on. And I'll leave it to Rye to pick some of those questions and ask them of me. And I'll share with you our kind of thinking, how we focus, how we talk about these things. I'll tell you what some of the challenges are as well. But before I do that, I want to share my thoughts on what I think Revvers want and how I've thought about our, I'll use a business term, our value proposition to you. Why would somebody want to work on Rev and not somewhere else? What is it that Revvers want us to deliver? Let me rattle off, you know, the five things that I think, in my experience, Revvers want and talk about how we're approaching them. I believe that Revvers want higher pay and higher productivity. I believe Revvers want more work. I believe Revvers want recognition. I believe Revvers want stability. I believe Revvers want convenient tools, like a nice experience. And I believe Revvers, in some cases, not all, want community and connection. On higher pay and productivity, that's been our focus. We hear from you, that's the number one issue, it's been our number one priority. That's why, as I mentioned before, our entire team has been working over the last two years to invest in tools to help you do your jobs better. And the folks that we've spoken to have, many of them report seeing 30% gains in productivity with these tools. And everything we've heard from Revvers and seen in our data suggests that Revvers are working a lot faster and making a lot more per hour of work than they did two years ago. We understand that there will never be a point where people say, we're happy where it is, everybody wants more, and we're working hard to deliver that. There's a number of things that we have done and have planned to continue to improve in this direction. So we'll keep working in productivity forever. I'll talk later more in this conversation about how we do have some efforts underway to try to charge customers more in certain areas. And then use that to pay more to freelancers. So for example, one of our largest customers right now is doing a pilot of a service with a higher quality tier. It's pretty crude, to be frank, it's not quite right. But we do want to try to find ways to charge customers more for things that they value. And higher quality is certainly one that a lot of customers have asked about. So part of our plans to make the job better is to find more ways to charge customers for things that they would value and to pay Revvers more in those cases. Seconds about more work.

[00:18:23] Speaker 2: So, Jace, we're about 20 minutes in. Did we want to try to get to questions or did you want to finish your thought here?

[00:18:29] Speaker 1: Give me five more minutes and then we'll do questions. Cool. Because I'm hitting here some of the themes that I think I've seen in the questions. Regarding more work, I mentioned we have a sales team that is calling companies, a lot of industries, to get work for you guys. So we're doing a lot more in sales and marketing to attract customers. We also, as I mentioned in the email yesterday, we want folks who are interested to be able to work across multiple services. So I've spoken to a bunch of Revvers who have been with Rev for years, have perfect fives, are Revver Plus, and they say, I applied to CaptionOne once and they got rejected and I've never done it and I'd like to. And I think it's madness that we haven't let them do that because I'm sure they do a wonderful job. So the change yesterday we talked about is going to let more Revvers work on more services. We want you to be able to work as much as you want on our platform. In recognition, we designed the Revver Plus tier to give recognition to people that have done a good job. And I think it does a couple things right, does a couple things wrong, I mentioned before. This anxiety over grading, I think, sucks. It's not what we intended. What I kind of felt after talking to a bunch of Revvers last week, Revver Pluses, was that they worked so hard to get to the top of the mountain, but they're kind of hanging on by their fingernails and they're worried that one bad grade knocks them off that level. And that's not what we wanted. I felt that's sort of a violation of the intended promise we have of the Revver Plus system. And so that's why we're rolling out tenure-based grading. What tenure-based grading means, for those that haven't read the email, is that if you've been with Rev for years getting really good grades, you can get a bunch of bad scores and you'll be okay, because we will look at a longer body of your work. We want people that have been here longer to feel more secure in their position, because that's important. And that leads to stability, because the Revver Plus designation is designed to deliver stability above all. Because as you guys know, we don't have as much work on Christmas Day or maybe Thanksgiving morning. And what I've typically seen, as we look at our marketplace, is the Revver Plus almost always have work, whereas Revvers don't. So we want to give stability to people that do good work. We're always going to work on better tools. Our community, in the early days, was really a great place to connect. As the communities got larger, we've seen that there's been more negativity in it. And a lot of people will email me privately saying, I want to talk in the forum, but it's so negative. So that's part of why we hired Rye. We wanted Rye to help direct the tone in a good direction and make it constructive, so people don't feel shut out. Beyond that, we'd love to find ways to help people connect, either with like-minded, kindred spirits, not all optional, but if you want to connect with people that want to discuss these issues, people you can learn from. Everyone I know likes to have peers that they can talk to, and we know that working at home can be lonely at times. We want to help you connect if you want to. We're also thinking about, we acknowledge that a rookie program is kind of a mess, and we need to try something different. We've been brainstorming on, are there ways we can introduce a mentorship program, where rookies could be paired with somebody who could mentor them and feel some kind of connection there. So there's some ideas we have, nothing fully baked there. The reality check I want to give though, is that as you guys try to, we'll try to do our best, especially going forward, explaining what we do and why, but you have to keep in mind a few things. We're a business, and so everything we do has to start with a customer who pays, and then we go to Revvers and try to do our best job to meet their needs. This change that rightfully pissed off a lot of people, it started with customer insight, and I think we botched the effort to go to the Revvers. As I mentioned, we should have taken more time, communicated better, and then we should have made grading better sooner, so that when we asked the Revver Pluses to do harder jobs, they didn't, you know, balk at it or get upset about it. So that's the screw-up, but I just want you to know that for everything, many of you guys do know this, but I just want to remind, when we think about a new program, can we charge more, can we do this, can we do that, the answer often cases is we'd like to, if we can get the customer to like it as well. So there's just, we have to get two parties, the customer and the Revver, on board with changes. Otherwise, it doesn't work. The last thing, as a business, we have competition. There's a competitor to us, a company called Vervit, some of you guys work for that's raised more venture capital than we have. I've spoken to a bunch of Revvers about them, and they say that Vervit pays a lot less than we do. So there's different philosophies out there. You know, our philosophy is we want to help Revvers earn more over time, and just know that there's a market out there, and we're a business, and we compete, and that's just a factor that you should be aware of. We're not going to talk about it a lot, but it exists, and you should know it. Finally, I'm going to ask you guys to, you know, bear with me, in some cases, have some patience. We'll communicate better, but as much as we would like, I would like nothing more than to get a list of the top 20 problems Revvers have, and go fix all 20 tomorrow. That's what I would like. The reality is that, as you guys know, most of our work is building software. Building software takes a lot of time. It's tricky and complicated, and we have a long list of things to do. We're going to, as I said, we're going to get more engineers working on things that directly improve your job, but things will take time. And the last thing is that, you know, and this comes down to maybe, it's related to the thing about intentions, but at least for me personally, this is my first time doing something like this. I started the company, you know, basically in my apartment, and, you know, now we have a lot of employees, a lot of engineers, and, you know, more Revvers than I could ever meet, and we're going to get a bunch of stuff wrong. Clearly, we get a bunch of stuff wrong this week, and I'm sure we'll make a lot of mistakes in the future. I'm hopeful that we won't make this exact mistake. We'll probably make other mistakes. I will do my damnedest to tell you clearly when I think we made a mistake and what we're doing to try to fix it, but I just want you to know that we're not going to get everything right. We're not, you know, there's some tech companies out there that are much larger than we are and have things we don't have. We're figuring things out, and we're going to try to listen better so we can be more responsive to your actual needs. That's sort of end of my kind of opening spiel. Rai, why don't you take me to some of the questions?

[00:25:28] Speaker 2: Rai, I can't hear you. Well, okay. So, in any case, we're about halfway through time right now. Have a bunch of questions from the community, and I see people who are actively asking questions on the forum. So, I think the big one that we probably want to tackle just right out of the gate is questions about pay. A couple examples. Lynette, in one of the messages before this, stated that the pay shift sucks, and even all things aside, it hasn't done much for morale. And then for the popcorn anyone thread, because the people who are actively talking right now, some people like some of the things you said make them feel like you might be calling Revvers lazy. Revvers who are trying right now to do hard jobs, they feel like they're making less in the same time spent. So, all of these things, basically, if you can chat a little bit about pay or things that we're going to be doing to iterate in the space.

[00:26:19] Speaker 1: Yeah. A couple of things here. You guys know this. Let me kind of restate a couple of things that maybe we said yesterday, and then get to the specific concerns. We're paying Revvers, in aggregate, in total, the same amount per minute of audio as we did a week ago or a month ago. That's, I think, important to know. But it's also important for me to admit and acknowledge something that I probably didn't fully appreciate, is that there are winners and losers. Some Revvers are making more than last week. Some are making less than last week. And the ones that are making more than last week aren't complaining in the forum, right? They're happily doing certain kinds of audio files. The ones that are making less than last week are letting us have it, as they should. But I mentioned before that, you know, when we did these meetups last week in Texas and Utah, I heard very clearly from some Revver pluses who have immaculate scores that there's a bunch of reasons they don't want to touch some of the harder files. And it mostly boils down to the fact, there's many reasons, but it boils down mostly to the fact, or half to the fact, that they're worried about getting a bad score because they're not confident that our grading system would appropriately take into account the difficulty of the audio. And they're right, is the bottom line, they're right. It's a tough problem. I don't have any quick fixes. I think there's a lot of stuff we can do better. Our teams have not been focused on that, or they haven't been focused squarely on it. They've been focused mostly on other stuff. Another factor that plays into this that I think I realized a day or two ago that probably wasn't in the top of my mind a week ago, is that early in the year, a lot of our larger customers said, hey, if your quality was better, we'd use you more. And so we've been doing, making changes to improve quality. And one of those changes, for example, is that we changed, we increased the accuracy and formatting requirements for Revit Plus from 4.6 to 4.8. And I believe that obviously fed into this anxiety because people have less wiggle room. If I go back to the point that several of you told me that you can only lose six points, well, under the old scoring, you could lose 12 points. And so I think that the fact that we raised our quality standards to, in an effort to better serve customers, I think compounded that anxiety. So I don't think the issue was anything of laziness. And if I, I can see how you would have maybe read that into my line, into my communication. And I'm sorry that people have that impression because I don't think it's about laziness. I think it's, you know, I think about Rev as a business with two sides. There's customers and Revvers, and we need to do everything we can to make people want to work with us. And for the Revver side, we need to make every job attractive. We don't, as you know, we don't force anybody to do anything, right? You don't have to come to Rev in the morning. You can do, you can come or not. You can do whatever job you want. And if you, Revvers are telling us they don't want to do a set of jobs. It's our job to change that, to make them, if not easier, but to make them more reasonable. I think to better set expectations. Back to the point I was making before about, you know, I said at the beginning, we want Revvers to feel that if you paid your dues, we have your back. And if you feel like taking a job, you're going to get a bad score, be punished. That that's a violation of the, of our aspiration for what we want you to feel. So we, it's true, I acknowledge, and I'm sorry that there are some Revvers who were claiming a set of jobs that if you're unable and willing, or don't feel like, or if we haven't done a good job making the harder jobs attractive, then this whole thing has been a negative for you. And it's because what the customers needed, we need customers, our customers need us to get these harder jobs done. That's the business change. And I'm sorry that it's, it has fallen disproportionately on one set of freelancers. We are going to do a lot of work to make the hard jobs more appealing. And we're contemplating things like, or I don't want to give the specific ideas because I don't want anybody to mistake those as a promise, but we are going to do a lot of work to try to make all jobs more attractive. And I think the pay was one aspect, but I think it's very clear that pay is, maybe less than half the story. I mean, we've been doing, asking people of why you don't take certain jobs and pay is on the list, but it's not the top of the list of what you guys are telling us. Right?

[00:31:13] Speaker 2: Okay. So, and a couple of people were, just so you see comments that are happening here in Lifetime. Some people are less concerned about metrics, more concerned about pay. But I think you kind of touched on that. Let's try to keep going through the questions we have here. Yeah.

[00:31:28] Speaker 1: The last thing I'll say about pay is that it's important. So, it's true that some Rebbers are, who are doing certain jobs, are making less now than a few months ago. And that sucks. It wasn't our intention. It was a by-product of choices we made for the customer. We believe that Rebbers are making a lot more now than they did one, two, or three years ago because of all the investment tools we made. And we're going to keep working on tools and technology to keep improving pay. We're also, as I mentioned, going to test services that would allow us to charge more and pay more, including charging for higher quality. So, I want you guys to know that we're going to continue working on efforts to improve productivity and to get customers to pay more, which will allow us to pay more. Thanks.

[00:32:17] Speaker 2: Okay. And that kind of leads into the next question we had on our list. So, Patrick on the forums talks about, would we consider charging customers more for difficult audio, passing on portions of that to Rebbers? Kristen calls out the cost of goods and services increases all the time. Why do we reduce pay to the workforce instead of increasing cost of services? Lots of people talk about charging customers more or other ways to pass on what we make to Rebbers. Can you chat on that a little bit?

[00:32:46] Speaker 1: Yeah. For a long time, we sort of felt our offering should be very, very simple. As you guys know, we have tried to keep things easy for the customer, almost too easy, and that we get all kinds of audio through this dollar a minute service. And we believe that when we think about how we serve the customer, the customers want convenience, we deliver it to them. We think that we're now at a point and a scale and a state of maturity as an organization that we can introduce new flavors of service, higher tiers and more offerings. In the first couple of years, we didn't think we could handle it because when you change the kind of service you offer, there's a lot of operational work behind the scenes to deliver on those promises. So until recently, we didn't offer any flavors. We just had transcription. Today, we have probably a couple things where customers pay more and we pay more. Notably, Rush, where we charge more and pay more. We also have UK English, where we charge more. And I'm pretty sure we also pay more to UK Revers. I've got to confirm that, but I'm pretty sure it's true. And as I mentioned, we used to serve almost only small customers out of the garage. We're now serving some more larger customers. And a lot of them are asking for higher quality, in some cases, not in all cases. They love our service, but some of them say, I have this content that needs two pairs of eyes on it or more quality control. So I would expect that we will certainly attempt to introduce services where we charge more for a variety of things, notably high quality. One other one that I may be jumping the gun here, but let me talk a little bit about Bad Audio because we don't like Bad Audio any more than you guys do. And we have heard since we were sort of asking people that near the top of the list of rev frustrations is some of the audio is a disaster, hard to decipher. And people understandably ask, well, why does Rev take this audio? And it's, I mean, you probably can guess the simple reason. It's because people can upload whatever they want. And we historically haven't had a good way to identify which audio is bad so we can deal with it. Because we're such an automated company, we don't have teams of people here listening to every file. It goes basically straight to you people. And we now have a lot of technology we didn't use to have. And we have a lot of marketplace signals, like if one job was unclaimed 20 times, that tells us something bad about the file. Hopefully it wouldn't ever get to that point. Our teams are thinking about, and I'm gonna encourage our teams to try to look for ways to charge customers more for bad audio, but only if we can do so in a way that's customer-friendly and isn't too confusing to the customer. Doing that would, I think, do a couple things. It would allow us to pay more for some of that audio. And it would also give the customer a financial incentive to record better audio. Because right now the customers, they can sit there eating a bag of Doritos next to their microphone and there's no skin off their back. So those are some of the things we're thinking about with regards to how do we charge customers more.

[00:36:22] Speaker 2: Okay. To change gears here just a little bit. Common thing that comes up on the forums is the belief that Revvers have that we are training AI to replace them. Something they point out often is lying. What are we doing on our end to make sure that Rev continues to be a place for great work-from-home jobs?

[00:36:39] Speaker 1: This is like my favorite question. I'm so glad somebody asked this because it gives me an opportunity to talk about where we're headed. I'll first start with an analogy from another industry. Planes, airplanes. Airplanes have had autopilots for a long time. I thought it was since the 70s. I Googled the other day. It turns out planes have had autopilot for more than 100 years. I've never been in a plane with no pilot. And I wouldn't want to be. In that industry, autopilot is really helpful, but there's still pilots. Now, I understand that transcription is not life or death, but I think that there's something to be said for the fact that that's one industry where the right answer for the customer is to have a human working with a combination of good technology. That's what we think is the answer for most of our market. I mentioned we have a sales team. Our sales team is talking to a lot of companies. Some of them are quite large companies. And some of those companies spend a lot of money on transcription. And they use us. And what they say is that they like our service. It's really fast. It's really convenient. The quality is okay. It's often good. Sometimes not as great. But when we ask those customers, how do we get better? How do we win more of your business? The top answer they give us is if your quality was better, more consistent, we would use you more often. So all the customers that I speak to want more and more quality. And we believe that quality can only be delivered by a human because language is complicated. Language is full of human judgment. Is there some audience where the AI can do a great job? Absolutely. But the world's a big complex place. And the customers we have and the customers we don't yet have want accuracy. On the other side of the coin of why your work is so important is that the AI is great at some jobs and not at other jobs. I think that if you think hard about what's happened and what's got everybody so worked up, to me the obvious explanation is that AI made some jobs so attractive that it made other jobs relatively unattractive. I think that's part of the story. Other part of the story is that we ratcheted up the pressure on grading with higher standards and it made those other jobs less attractive as well. But as you guys know, AI works great on some audio, not others. On some audio, the AI is useless. And another factor is that when I speak to some of our best transcriptionists, the one that have been here the longest, what they say is they never use LINE. Some of them say even if LINE does a good job, they're so fast at typing, they're so good at listening, they can do it better on their own. So LINE could probably transcribe better than I could, but not better than some of those of you who are the most experienced. We've spent more than a small amount of time on this. I mean, we have a team of speech scientists that is on the cutting edge of using all the technology out there. And that technology is going straight into LINE, into your hands. So we're working hard to give you tools to do the job better. Is there some customer work that for which the jobs will go away? For sure. And I think that's a big part of it. For sure. I'll give you an example of that. I can think of a few small podcasters, people who podcast out of their garage. And when we rolled out what at the time we call Temi, now it's on Rev, this automated service, they said, oh, I don't need really great accuracy. I'm just doing this for my podcast. So this automated thing is good enough for me. So for customers who just want good enough quality, the AI is good enough, right? So yeah, there may be a loss of jobs. On the other hand, that's bringing a lot of new people to the space. So most of the customers, of all the customers we're getting for automated services, the vast majority have never transcribed before. So I'm hopeful over time, we'll grow the market by getting more people to find, hey, if you record audio, that can be pretty useful if people want to see what was in it. As I said, the bulk of the market, you look at whether it's services like Netflix, whether it's college lectures, if you're attending college 10 years from now, are you gonna get a textbook? Are they gonna have a textbook 10 years from now? Are kids gonna be carrying 25 textbooks in their backpacks 20 years from now? I kind of doubt it. I mean, video seems to me like where it's going with education. And if you or your child was in a college classroom, would you want their lecture notes to be full of mistakes? I don't think so. I think you want them right. So I think the human work is really important. There's a book that influenced some of our thinking. I believe it was called Race Against the Machines. It's a book on exactly this topic, Race Against the Machines. It was written by a couple of people that study automation and the impact on jobs. And they've studied this, how this plays out in many industries. And it's a short book. And in the last chapter of the book, they say that, well, they talk about things in pop culture, right? Pop culture scares the hell out of you, right? Because pop culture is Terminator and Skynet and the sort of dystopian vision of robots coming and killing everybody. And it's great movie fodder, but it's nonsense. I mean, so the public worries the robots are going to kill everybody. The people that build the technology worry that the robots won't even work at all, right? So the people that build the robots, the big fear is they don't work, right? Not that they're going to kill us all. And that's kind of what we see here. We think that the right answer for most customers is to have the best people, the best freelancers combined with the best technology. So that's our vision. We don't think of this as people versus machines. We think of it as people plus machines. So in a book I mentioned, Race Against the Machines, in the last chapter, what they said was, we believe the solution to this AI and jobs question is that people should be able to do the work is that people should, in their words, quote, race with the machines. Okay, race with the machines. What does that mean? That means that the machines can help you work better and faster, right? That's what we believe is the right answer. And that's what we're working towards.

[00:43:05] Speaker 2: Rai, you're muted, bud. Uh, yeah. So just as a quick heads up, Jason, there's some comments in the forums about getting a little bit off track for the questions. I'll do the best we can to try to get as many questions as we can. We have about 14 minutes left here.

[00:43:20] Speaker 1: Okay, I'll do rapid fire. I'll keep all my responses to 30 seconds with us.

[00:43:24] Speaker 2: Okay, cool. So Caroline on the forums asked about the process for customers submitting files and files arriving in the queue. Since it's automated, how do we know which are the difficult files to apply the new pricing model to?

[00:43:37] Speaker 1: We have a bunch of technology. We're not gonna give all the details about it, but we have a lot of, I mean, look, you know, we're using speech recognition, right? So we're looking into the content of the files technically. I will say that there's a lot of other factors we probably could and should use to assess difficulty. People have mentioned, what if there's multiple speakers? What if there's research required? We don't know yet. I'm not sure if we know how to include that, but it's our intention to get all the information we can, some from the customer manually provided, some automatically, to better assess quality or better assess difficulty. So we're gonna try to take more factors in, but we're gonna try to do it in an efficient way.

[00:44:14] Speaker 2: We have a bunch of questions about quality control for files before Rev accepts them. Examples as Thalia talks about, like an audible poor audio quality files have been accepted by Rev. Transcribers are being penalized for giving their best, even though the file might be close to impossible to do. Rachel calls out, like what's Rev doing to address the number of garbage quality files being submitted by customers? We can kind of talk about that for a little bit.

[00:44:39] Speaker 1: Yeah, so there's two sides to that. The, I'm gonna guess, I'm gonna hit the second piece of it first. When she said Rev was being penalized, that goes back to what I said. Our grading system is messed up for a lot of reasons, but the main one is that we should be grading on a curve. If you are transcribing a tough audio file, you should not feel like you're gonna be grading more harshly because the file is tough. So that's something we gotta figure out. Now, grading on a curve is difficult, right? It's difficult to get a lot of people marking to the same sheet of music. And so we're gonna work on that. It's not gonna get fixed overnight, but we'll work on it. On the bad audio, as I mentioned, there's no easy perfect fix because customers will do what they're gonna do. But as I said, we're gonna look into whether or not we can use a financial incentive, like charging them more to try to encourage some people to give us better audio. But that's a long, hard road. And I wouldn't expect us to be able to work magic overnight.

[00:45:40] Speaker 2: The next one we think on here is about research for work. So the theme of these questions are about how we compensate for research time going for different customers. Jennifer emailed in discussions about file difficulty, the phrase easy file gets used often. Revvers assume that this means clear audio, few speakers. But as many Revvers can verify, it's not uncommon that even though some jobs have clear audio, the amount of time for research impacts how quickly they can work those files. And then in one of the big threads in the forums, people just talk about generally, are there plans to consider research term as part as a CPM for what we're paying for TC jobs?

[00:46:15] Speaker 1: I think Jennifer's right. I'd love to do that. I don't know that I know an easy way. We can think about that. Part of the challenge is, because we were so easy to use for the customer, we don't ask them for much information. What we find is that when we go to the customer experience or start asking them a lot of things, it can lower their likelihood to order and get us less business. So if we knew how much research was required in a job, we can maybe factor it in. Today, I think we don't. So I think we'd like to get there. I'm not sure that we know how to get there. Short answer.

[00:46:55] Speaker 2: All right, we have about 10 minutes left. I know you talked a lot about support and experts, but just to make sure that we have a chance to weigh in this, Ashley talks about like plans to put in place to increase staff availability for Revvers of all levels. Melanie talks about it takes very long to hear back from experts. She's on the captioning side. They have to sometimes wait a full day before they get an answer when they have short deadlines. And then another one, an expert actually emailed to add some notes. The expert who doesn't want to be named called out. They feel like they're in a bad situation because the expectations Revvers have of experts is to rule on gray areas. Experts aren't given the authority to do that. And often on the forums, people come there and give them a hard time.

[00:47:41] Speaker 1: Yeah, this area is a mess and it's our bad. There's the easier part and the harder part. The easier part is getting more availability. We're gonna figure out how to get more people answering questions more quickly to get you better response times. I'll promise we'll make big strides on that between now and Christmas. We're gonna look into that later today and figure out what's going wrong there because it's an embarrassment. And I'm sorry about that. The gray areas is the harder part. Okay, we know that we could spend hours on our style guide. It's tricky. It's better than it used to be. It solves problems. I don't have any easy fix for the gray areas and I understand that that's where a lot of issues are. We'll work on that too. But refining our rules is a long, hard road. Increasing availability so we answer your questions. That should not be too hard. We should be able to do that pretty quickly. I'm glad you guys alerted us to it. And again, when I started off by saying, sorry for not listening. I think if we listened better, we would have caught this problem sooner. So thank you for putting it in our faces.

[00:48:43] Speaker 2: The next one, and again, apologize for calling someone else specifically, but I'm gonna call this the Joel question. So in September, as we announced review, Grader's got an email about being committed to QC and gradient as a reliable income stream for people. But since this message, Joel calls out that people he talked to that do TCE grading, some of them feel like they're getting a 25 to 40% reduction in earnings in the same time that they spend. They just wanna know what we're doing to make sure that gradients are reliable revenue stream for people who are, that prefer to do that kind of work here at Rev.

[00:49:17] Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna have a great answer for Joel, but I'll tell you what I think is the reality. And that quality control for us is always a work in progress. Our system is constantly developing and the way quality control works today is very different than how it worked a couple of years ago. And the main reason we make changes to quality control is to improve quality. And the way we do that is we talk to customers about where the problems are. And I think some of the changes that Joel has described going to recently is we realized we were spending a lot of quality control time and effort on grading files of rookies for practice jobs that I think we later concluded was kind of a waste of time and effort. It didn't help quality much and we should use that time and effort in other ways. And so we basically got rid of a certain category of quality work and then we're trying to do more of this new kind of quality work where we're trying to look at more files before they go to the customer. So again, the change we made was let's spend less time and effort grading and reviewing the work of rookies and more time and effort trying to grade customer work before it goes to the customer. So less practice jobs, more before it goes to the customer. The reason for that was to help the customer experience. And we also I think broaden a lot of new graders probably more than we should. We probably haven't done a good job at getting them all on the same page working with the same sheet of music. And so I think part of what may be happening here is we probably haven't done a good job we probably had divided the work across more people. You know, I don't, I want to be clear about what we aspire to do and I don't want people to I don't want people to glob on to promises they have in their head that we haven't made. We've never gotten up and said it's our mission to make grading the world's best income stream. Now, we'd like a lot of things to work, right? That's a job type we have. We hope Revvers like working on our platform. We have a bunch of kinds of jobs. There's going to be times where we may have this week we may have a lot of caption work or a lot of work of a certain type. And next week the customers may not give us any. So we may not have any captions work. We may not have a certain kind of work next week. So the kinds of work we have are going to come and go depending on what we can get from the customer. We will do our best to get a lot of all kinds of work. But again, we're a business. We serve customers. And we're not always going to have all the work people like. And that's a reality. I think there's a lot of things that we can and should improve in grading. I don't mean to suggest that we don't have a lot of work to do. I think we do have a ton of work to do. I just want to remind folks that these changes start with the customer and we need to do a better job of thinking about how it affects you guys as we work through them. That's some of the context. All right.

[00:52:25] Speaker 2: We have about five minutes here. So we'll get through as many of these as we can. So here's one of the rookie questions. Christine calls out in the forums that they're a rookie. They're getting longer, harder files. They're frustrated because they're worried about a low grade taking their metrics. They don't have small files to take. It's very hard for them to bring up their scores. They believe that we are purposely trying to get rid of rookies. If you can talk on this for a little bit.

[00:52:51] Speaker 1: So I had to laugh at the last part. It would be very suicidal if we were making all this effort to attract rookies and then trying to shut them out of the system. She's totally right except for the last part. We agree 100% that rookies are being given work that is too hard for them. It'd be like you walk into seventh grade and you're given calculus and then you wouldn't make it through the class. That's what's happening today in our system and it's madness. And that's why we changed the job pricing. That's why. We think she's right. That's why we changed the job pricing because there was a tension. And again, I think what I'm saying is I think we did it for the right reasons but we did a lousy job rolling it out. I think we rolled it out too fast. We didn't take questions. We didn't listen well enough. We didn't make the harder jobs easier in the right way. We didn't fix grading. A lot of things we did wrong but the reason for the change was to solve the issue that this rook is describing.

[00:53:47] Speaker 2: So next question. Lots of revers have brought up that they feel like some of the issues with inefficiencies for how we're using money is that jobs being done and paid for multiple times, redos. Mouse on the forums asks, are there plans to address the issues of files being redone and paid for multiple times?

[00:54:07] Speaker 1: Yes, same answer. We've spent a lot of time studying companies that make things in complex processes. And what we've learned is that the way to have good quality, whether you're making a car or a transcript, is to do it right the first time, right? Trying to turn, you know, you can't, there's an old saying, you can't make chicken salad out of chicken, you know what, right? And taking a crappy job and redoing it four times is a lousy route to anything. That's not what we want to do, right? So again, our, our whole reason for being here and the business need that led us to make this series of maybe, you know, clumsy changes was we want skilled people to do harder work so it doesn't have to be redone. That's what we're trying to get to. And we're going to keep trying to get there because if the customers are happy, the customers are happy on average, but they're not happy about some of these files. If the customers are happier, good things happen. We get more business, we grow more, give them work to you folks. All right.

[00:55:09] Speaker 2: I'm going to try to get through two-ish more questions and then we'll be at the end of the hour and we can wrap up. So the opposite of the question we just answered, Caroline on the forums, suggest or ask, is it possible to raise the barrier to entry so we have better qualified rookies? They mentioned that the redos that they're currently looking at are scary.

[00:55:28] Speaker 1: Totally, totally. I mean, it's always hand in hand. What happened this year? Another thing I'm embarrassed about is because rookies were having a bad experience, we had to let too many of them in. It makes a lot more sense to let fewer people in who are more qualified and get them doing good work faster. We think the current way rookies learn the ropes is painfully hard. And as I mentioned, we're interested in, can we find the mentor, somebody to help them out? It is our intention to get a little smarter about what makes a great Revver Plus to try to find applicants that maybe meet those criteria and have a good chance of getting there and then give them more support. I would much rather we let in far fewer rookies and have a far higher percent make it to the higher levels. That's where we want to get to.

[00:56:25] Speaker 2: Okay, one of the last ones I think we might be able to get. Lots of people talk about style guides, style guide implementations. Melanie on the forums ask, why aren't simple edits to the study guide implemented more often? We get feedback about certain points in the style guide being unclear. They're not talking about massive changes to style guide, but why don't we do a simple, short additions more often?

[00:56:47] Speaker 1: We probably should. I mean, we have folks working on operational problems and at times we work the style guide now and then we haven't worked on it on a steady basis. I think she makes a good point. I understand the style guide is a source of a lot of frustration. Some of the reps I spoke to have said, they really want to talk to me about one phrase in the style guide that's unclear, which to them, it drives them crazy for good reasons. So I think the style guide is an area where we need to work on it. We know nobody loves it and we don't love it either. We've worked on it a lot, but we have more to do there. So thanks for that consideration. We'll certainly discuss it with the team.

[00:57:24] Speaker 2: And then maybe last one, even though we're a little bit over time, see Holly called out recently, nevermind about losing rookies. What types of things are we going to do in the future to persuade veterans to stay? What are we going to do to retain our best reppers?

[00:57:40] Speaker 1: So I mentioned early on a bunch of stuff that we're trying to do to make rep better. Let me just come back to, mention again of the changes we announced yesterday, new benefits for River Plus. Tenure-based grading, it obviously, it's been announced. We haven't rolled it out. We're going to roll it out as soon as we can. We've committed to do it before end of February. I'm hopeful we can do it sooner. No promises on date. As we said, we want those who've done good work over time to feel like we have your back and to feel like you can have a bad day and not have to worry about it. We're going to try to make River Plus feel more appreciated, less nervous about their work and give them more kinds of work to do. And over time, I'm hopeful that some of them will have higher pay, especially if we can find higher value services that we can charge the customers for. And I think we can, given what we've heard from them about wanting more quality. So those are some of the top level things we're going to do. I think we're coming up on time here. So in closing, I'm hopeful that this has been helpful to some of you guys. You guys know my email address. I think it's jason.rip.com. I read everything I get. If you want to send more ideas, follow-ups, I'd love to hear it. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Don't hold back. We love hearing it. I want to thank all of you guys who took the time to join us here. We're going to listen better. We're going to communicate better. We're going to try not to be as insensitive when we make changes. And we're going to be doing meetups, not everywhere. But if you live near a big city, maybe you get one. Why don't you bug Ry and ask him to come to a town near you? And we'll get him a, we'll buy him some plane tickets and he'll make it happen. Thank you all for the time. And again, also, if any of you do want to email me, let me know any ideas you have. I'd love to know how to make these better in the future. So my intention is to do this again in a few months. And if you guys tell me what you'd like us to cover or how to use the time, we're open to ideas. Thanks, everyone. Have a great weekend. Great. Appreciate it, everyone.