Pros
Set your own schedule; over time (a lot of time), you can make halfway decent money. By the end of my time at SpeakWrite, I averaged around $18/hour, but I had stopped caring about their rigorous formatting rules by then. My mother is still with SpeakWrite, making this her fourth year, and she earns about $12/hour still attending to their specifications. Despite everything I'm going to complain about in the "con" section, at the time I went to work for SpeakWrite I was in a desperate situation and SpeakWrite got me out of it. I, very begrudgingly, have to admit without SpeakWrite, I may not have gotten back on my feet.
Cons
So many. My biggest complaint is that the company goes to great lengths to ensure that typists can not communicate with each other unless it is supervised. Also: It took me at least 6 months to become proficient enough with their bizarre rules to even make minimum wage. Scheduling is first-come, first-serve based on the number of hours you work each week, so if you take a vacation and don't work for a week, you are at the bottom of the heap for choosing hours. For me that meant working all night, earning little or no money (most people don't find the need to submit dictation at 2:00 a.m.) just to have enough hours on the clock to move up in the ranks. The standards for formatting are arbitrary, not based on anything I've seen. The proofreaders are inconsistent. Most of all, the company pay has remained flat since the business opened, despite charging clients more and more. This company claims you will be a contract employee but this is utter nonsense. They should absolutely be paying their fair share of Social Security. Some of the work is also extremely challenging. Dictations are often very unpleasant subjects. Having that piped in your brain for eight hours a day while being constantly criticised for any "error" you make while earning less than you would working at a gas station is tedious.