Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk - Welcome

Interesting….

Some tasks just do not lend themselves to automation at this time, and this is where Amazon’s Mechanical Turk steps in. Bascially, they offer an API, which connects to their website, where humans solve the problem through microtasks, and report back the information.

Image analysis is one area, as well as transcription, where it may be more cost effective, or technically just not feasible to automate such a procedure.

It does have a cost however, in that the human parts of the program do need to be compensated. Still for some applications, its a nifty idea.

Of course, it would be interesting to see how one could leverage this approach in a product development arena. I wonder if tasks could be broken down in such a way, that development could be accelerated. It certainly would be something interesting to consider.