What does it mean to be paid by task and not hourly?
‘Paid by task’ means being paid per item (image, video, utterance, audio, etc.) submitted. Generally, a project may pay by task when the work is short term or one-off activity that involves annotating, transcribing, or collecting data. In Appen Connect, these projects are typically ‘Data Collection’ projects.
Projects paying by task tend to be quick activities that you can do only once. For each project you will be asked to submit or annotate videos, photos, text, or audios (which type of data you will submit or annotate is specified in the project guidelines). The exact amount paid per 'task' and the definition of what is a 'task' can be seen next to the Options button in Appen Connect, when you look for your project. A 'task' is usually a certain number of items (recordings, videos, texts, images, etc.). See below to know where to find the pay rate on our website (1) and our Appen Mobile app (2):
-
Appen Connect website:
-
Appen Mobile App:
What is the annotated/transcribed/collected data used for?
After we collect/annotate/transcribe data (with the help of our Contributors), it goes through a process of cleaning and preparation into a format that can be used by AI models. Some examples of how data is used by our clients include:
-
Autonomous Vehicles
- Self-driving cars using deep learning for navigation and traffic analysis.
-
Personal assistants
- Voice-activated assistants using natural language processing to understand and respond to queries.
-
Healthcare
- AI systems for personalized cancer treatment plans based on medical records.
- Algorithms predicting acute kidney injury in advance.
-
Language Translation
- Neural machine translation for providing translations between different languages.
- Real-time translation in messaging applications.
How do you determine fair pay per task?
For projects that are task-based, we use an hourly rate as the basis of our calculations to ensure tasks are priced fairly. The hourly rate we calculate our pay by task on is at or above minimum wage in each country where we work, in accordance with our Crowd Code of Ethics.
In order to calculate pay by task, our team undertakes all the same steps a Contributor would (including registration, qualification, reading of guidelines and task execution) and they assess the estimated time required to successfully complete the project task. During this process, we look to identify gaps, potential steps that would delay a contributor getting into the project, or to complete the task and address these if we can, or increase the pay by task to reflect additional time it might take.
Where can I find more information about how much I will be paid on projects?
Payment rate, frequency and terms depends on the project and are explained in detail under the “Quality and Payment FAQ” tab of each Data Collection project.
We hold ourselves and our Contributors to a high standard of quality, so we manually quality check all the data submitted. Our quality expectations for each project are outlined in “Quality and Payment FAQ” so that you can avoid common mistakes.
Depending on the project, we will:
- pay for all your submissions;
- pay proportionally for all your accepted submissions;
- pay proportionally but only if a certain percentage or amount of your submissions are accepted.
Those projects are paid weekly. The time between data submissions and payment depends on the time we need to quality check your data. Be reassured that we will do our best to check everything within 2 weeks.
If you are unsure about the pay-rate, task volume or quality metrics on your project, please reach out to us HERE before proceeding to the task.
