Amazon Mechanical Turk

July 31, 2006 by Oliver
Filed under: Computers, Programming, Technology, Web Programming 

It’s so crazy it just might work.

I heard about AMT a while ago and thought it looked cool. But not much was happening with it. Well now it’s beginning to take off more and it might be usable in my language app.

It’s essentially a work marketplace wrapped in a web service API. Your application creates a job request (called a Human Intelligence Task) which someone then completes with the result being sent back to your application. So far it’s commonly used for processing lots of small tasks (for example there’s one about verifying info about some restaurants that only pays $0.03 but there are over two thousand individual tasks available), but it can be used for anything.

The relevance is that it might be possible to get people to record audio for the language app through it.

Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Amazon, web services, Amazon Mechanical Turk

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Comments

4 Comments on Amazon Mechanical Turk

  1. Oliver on Mon, 31st Jul 2006 3:44 pm

    2. It seems there is a small problwm with AMT – you need a US bank account to use it as a requester…

  2. Oliver on Tue, 1st Aug 2006 9:29 am

    3. I wonder if Google are creating a competitor? Surely this is a good candidate for someone’s 20% time… an extension of Google Answers perhaps…

  3. RyanC on Tue, 1st Aug 2006 11:50 am

    4. What competitor?

  4. Oliver on Tue, 1st Aug 2006 4:53 pm

    5. A competitor to Amazon Mechanical Turk…