Sonic Audit Specialist - Italian

What you'll do

Mercor is hiring Italian speakers to audit speech data for Amazon's Sonic project, reviewing what annotators and an automated aligner have already produced:

• Multilingual Transcription Audit: listen to a recording of human or agent speech, read the transcript, tag every applicable error code, decide pass or fail, and write a short rationale
• Forced Alignment Audit: check word-level segments cut by an automated system, verifying start and end times and the reference text, then fix boundaries, split, merge, add or remove segments as needed

Italian alignment has its own traps: elided articles and prepositions ("l'amico", "dell'anno") that are one written token but two words, double consonants whose length decides where a boundary falls, and vowels that run together across words in natural speech. On the transcription side, regional accents in the recordings can make a correct transcript sound wrong, and the job is telling a real annotator error from genuine acoustic ambiguity.

Both collections are listed at 5.00 audit hours per task, with every judgment backed by a written reason. A short calibration comes first.

Who qualifies

• Native or near-native Italian as spoken in Italy: born and raised there, or fully fluent with five or more years of residence. A hard requirement.
• Strong English reading and writing, as the rulebook, codes and rationales are in English
• Disciplined, consistent application of written standards; transcription, subtitling, localisation, annotation or QA experience is a strong signal
• An ear for similar sounds and word boundaries

Helpful: AI data or evaluation experience, phonetics or linguistics, waveform tools.

No current residence requirement is stated, so this listing is not country-restricted.

What it pays

$39.50 per hour, published by Mercor, the same as Spanish and just under French and German ($41.50). The Asian-language versions pay far less (Japanese $37.50, Korean $25, Chinese $21.50, Hindi $18), as does Portuguese ($25). Mercor's Italian audiobook QA role pays $15–20, so for Italian speakers with transcription experience this is the stronger listing by a wide margin.

Weekly payments via Stripe or Wise. H-1B and STEM OPT candidates are excluded.

Worth knowing

Good:

• More than double the Italian audiobook QA rate
• Clear rules and error codes rather than subjective scoring
• Remote and self-scheduled

Less good:

• Fiddly waveform work in the alignment collection
• English rationales on every item
• Hours and duration not stated; contractor terms

About this listing

Posted by Mercor as an hourly remote contract, read from the live listing on 24 September 2026. Rate, collections and language requirement are from the ad. See Mercor.