Amazon's Mechanical Turk

You may have heard about Amazon's Mechanical Turk. I must admit that it seemed to me an odd thing for Amazon to be getting into, but whatever makes them happy. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a bit of human intelligence that can be injected into a computer program. The AMT will even pay you for your human brainpower! (It just won't be much.)

The AMT information page is at the Amazon Web services site. Named after a famous chess hoax, the Mechanical Turk is a Web services API that allows programmers to insert a request for human intelligence into their programming. The request is called a HIT. Humans are paid for their work on the HITs, and Amazon takes a commission. (Payments can be as low as a fraction of a penny, so don't reserve your Segway just yet.)

If you want to see what the Turk is like, go to http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome. Here you'll be able to see what HITs are available as well as answer a few if you like. Click on the Get Started Now button to, well, get started.

The first thing you'll see is that Amazon does not offer a way to filter the HITs -- you can search them by keyword, or you can list them by certain characteristics, but you can't, for example, list all the HITs specific to someone in Dallas Texas. Which is a pity because a lot of the ones available are for people living in certain areas. Each HIT describes itself, ("Rank Your Top 3 -- Dallas, TX"), expiration date, time allotted, and payment.

(WOO HOO! A PENNY! PACK UP THE TRUCK, ELMER, WE'RE GOING TO MAUI!)

If you find one interesting you can view an expanded description. If you like that one, you can click on View a HIT in this Group which will give you a full description of what's desired. From there you can choose to work on the HIT or skip the HIT. In order to work on the HIT, you'll have to be logged in to your Amazon account and, if you have not yet done so, you will have to agree to the Mechanical Turk licensing agreement.

In addition to the regular HIT listings, there are also qualification tests you can take which are required for some HITs (it looks like these are the ones that pay better.) Click on the Qualifications tab at the top of the screen, and then the All Qualifications option. The ones I looked at were for language translation, data extraction, and podcast transcription. Do the test and a human grades it and lets you know if you passed.

There aren't many HITs available here yet, which makes it hard to judge how useful or enticing it would be. If it was heavily populated with a lot of tasks that could be easily done for a penny, I'm not sure how often I'd bother to drop by and do some tasks. On the other hand, if there was a mobile phone version so I could spend my time while I was in line, waiting in the car, etc. piling up pennies, that would be cool.

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