Sonic Audit Specialist - Japanese

What you'll do

Mercor is hiring Japanese speakers to audit, not produce, speech training data for Amazon's Sonic project. There are two collections:

• Multilingual Transcription Audit: listen to human or agent speech, check the annotator's transcript against it, tag all applicable error codes, give a pass or fail and a short written rationale
• Forced Alignment Audit: review word-level segments from an automated aligner, verifying timestamps and reference text, and correcting boundaries, splitting, merging, adding or deleting segments where the machine erred

Japanese transcription throws up judgment calls that other languages do not. The same word can be written in kanji, hiragana or katakana, and the rulebook decides which is correct; numbers can be kanji or Arabic numerals; fillers like えーと and あの need consistent handling; and with no spaces in the script, word segmentation for alignment follows a convention you must apply exactly. Long vowels and geminate consonants are where boundary errors tend to hide.

Both collections run at 5.00 audit hours per task, the ad says, and each judgment needs a written reason. A short calibration phase comes first.

Who qualifies

• Native or near-native Japanese as spoken in Japan: born and raised there, or fully fluent with five or more years living there. A hard requirement.
• Strong English reading and writing, since the rulebook and all rationales are in English
• Consistency in applying a written standard over hundreds of items; transcription, subtitling, localisation, annotation or QA experience is valued
• Careful listening for similar sounds and word boundaries

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

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

What it pays

$37.50 per hour, published by Mercor. That is well above the other Asian-language versions of the same brief (Korean $25, Chinese $21.50, Hindi $18) and close to the European ones (Italian and Spanish $39.50, French and German $41.50). Portuguese pays $25.

Weekly payment through Stripe or Wise. H-1B and STEM OPT candidates are excluded.

Worth knowing

Good:

• The best-paid Asian language in the Sonic audit set
• Structured, rule-driven audit work
• Remote, self-scheduled

Less good:

• Script and segmentation conventions demand a lot of rulebook reading up front
• English rationales for 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 the ad's own. See Mercor.