What the work involves

You run a specialized build of an AI assistant app on your personal Mac and use it the way a real user would — dictating messages and emails, asking it to summarize a document, apply a spreadsheet formula, reformat text, or generate an image. The tasks are yours to invent within the project brief, so the value you add is producing interactions that sound like genuine Japanese speech rather than sanitized prompt-engineering. After each interaction you record the verbatim transcript of what you actually said, produce a cleaned-up version, rate the assistant's response, and log everything into a tracking sheet with the supporting audio uploaded to a shared drive.

The rating work is where most of the judgment sits. A response can be grammatically fine Japanese and still be wrong — wrong register for the recipient, an unnatural 直訳 that reads like machine translation, or a misheard homophone that changed the meaning entirely. You are expected to notice and describe these failures precisely, in Japanese, and to be consistent across dozens of similar cases.

What the platform screens for

Mercor runs a roughly 25-minute conversational AI interview covering your background, your day-to-day use of productivity software, and your motivations. Expect follow-ups that test whether your Japanese is genuinely native — register-switching, spoken-versus-written distinctions, dialect — and whether you can read and follow detailed English instructions without paraphrasing them loosely. The hardware requirement is a real gate: Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3) on macOS Sequoia 15.0 or newer, verified during technical setup. Applicants who guess at their chip or OS version and turn out to be on Intel or an older release are dropped at onboarding.

Logistics

  • Remote, self-directed, largely asynchronous — you choose when to run sessions, but you need a quiet enough environment to record clean voice audio
  • Four-week duration with an immediate start; treat it as a fixed-term project, not ongoing work
  • Observed rate $24/hr; hours are typically flexible but throughput and log completeness matter more than a fixed schedule
  • Onboarding includes setting up a Mercor Expert email and completing technical setup before any paid work begins