Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk web service enables companies to programmatically access this marketplace and a diverse, on-demand workforce. Developers can leverage this service to build human intelligence directly into their applications.
While computing technology continues to improve, there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings or researching data details. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce (which is time consuming, expensive and difficult to scale) or have gone undone.
Mechanical Turk aims to make accessing human intelligence simple, scalable, and cost-effective. Businesses or developers needing tasks done (called Human Intelligence Tasks or “HITs”) can use the robust Mechanical Turk APIs to access thousands of high quality, low cost, global, on-demand workers — and then programmatically integrate the results of that work directly into their business processes and systems. Mechanical Turk enables developers and businesses to achieve their goals more quickly and at a lower cost than was previously possible.
From a users point of view, Mechanical Turk allows individuals to make money and help with volunteer work such as search and rescue. You can make money from doing research, writing blog entries, taking surveys or even answering simple questions.
Signup is free and easy, so check out Mechanical Turk today!
Once upon a time in Puxico, Missouri, an eager little 12-year-old accepted a unique challenge from his father. “You know that record you keep playing all the time?” the father asked, referring to a now-forgotten side by the great Chet Atkins. The boy said yes. The father replied that if the boy could learn to play it himself on the father’s guitar, he would buy the boy a brand new instrument of his very own.
