10/31 - ʞɔᴉɹ┴ or Treat to ┴ɥɹᴉllǝɹ Tuesday!

William Byrne [A1MFQCRJ26PG1D] 4-minute conversation: Need MIC and HEADPHONES - $1.10 | PANDA

Fair

1-3 days

Acceptable

$10.73 / hour
00:06:09 / completion time

Pros: - HITs are extremely consistent, and are dropped on weekdays from 5pm-8pm at intervals of six minutes. There are three batches of hits daily (launched 5-6, 6-7, and 7-8) with 1-3 hits available per batch, 3 being the most common (for a possible total of 3-9 hits per turker per day).
- The hit always tells you how many of that batch will be available that day ("LIMIT THREE PER WORKER PER DAY", etc.) and will prevent you from accidentally doing too many (you'll get the "no soup for you" message if you try to go over).
- While the hit itself is not hosted on Endor (so you can return without consequence), the link to the hit is and if you refresh or close the tab it will count as one of your attempts, regardless of whether or not you actually tried to do it (if you accidentally close the tab I suggest you ctl+shift+T ASAP so you can grab the cached tab before it disappears).
- You do talk to a real human, but it's done via TTS on their end so responses take a bit of time, and also you have a bullet list of points to go through most of the time. This makes it far less anxiety-inducing than normal audio hits would for me.
- Usually the actual active part of the hit only lasts 2-6 minutes.
Cons: - The time spent "on" the hit can vary widely—while the dialogues themselves are short, the queue to talk to an assistant can be very very long. All you have to do is leave the tab open while you wait from place 10 in line, but this can take anywhere from 2-20 minutes, during which the 30 minute timer might expire. Plus, it's frustrating to be tied to a hit for that long. Occasionally after waiting for awhile and making it all the way to first in line, you are knocked out the queue with the message that no assistants are available and you have to start over.
- As mentioned previously, it does involve talking to a real person and this can be nerve-wracking for some, especially if the assistant is having a hard time understanding you due to connection problems, etc. You will also need a microphone/headset, as it's required for these hits as per the instructions.
- Occasionally the assistant will hang up mid conversation for no apparent reason,, or after completing the entire session the assistant will fail to disconnect properly (if you hang up you are not paid). Both cases are extremely frustrating but there's nothing you can do either give up or start the process over.
- Some of the less-structured dialogues are much more time consuming and frustrating—one in particular is pretty much guaranteed to be 7-10 minutes instead of the usual 2-6; I avoid these. After doing them for awhile you start to recognize which dialogues you prefer.
- It's a Google requester, so if you have any questions you're pretty much screwed. They don't reply to messages (though they might read them). Fortunately their hit instructions are pretty clear, so you should rarely have cause to message anyway.

To read William Byrne's full profile check out TurkerView!​

 

Behold; literally all my knowledge of Byrnes that I waited to post until later at night so not as many people would notice.

Be impressed by my thoroughness @ChrisTurk.