Introduction to Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a platform that offers businesses the ability to outsource their work to an online workforce, where work is defined as any task that can be completed by an individual with a computer, an internet connection, the intelligence to read a set of instructions, and the willingness to complete the task for the specified reward. Workers can be located anywhere in the world and Amazon boasts of an educated and active workforce located in more than 100 countries. Workers can be paid as little as $0.01 per task, and payment only happens if the work is approved. The significance of this is that businesses effectively have a workforce that is:

• Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year
• Scalable with your business needs - no overhead of hiring or firing staff or contractors
• Inexpensive relative to alternative workforces - only pay for completed and approved tasks, not the hours the Worker spent completing the task
• Speedy at completing tasks - have your results within hours of submitting your data rather than waiting days or weeks

The MTurk platform was designed from the ground up to be efficient at enabling a distributed workforce to complete thousands or even millions of small tasks quickly. Tasks such as tagging objects in a photos, correcting mailing addresses, or cleaning a large database of unstructured information can be performed very quickly and cost-effectively with MTurk. Nearly any task that requires some form of human judgment can be completed by the workforce. The key is to break the work down into small tasks, which get distributed to a workforce. Each Worker can work on their own pipeline of your tasks, where as soon as one task is complete, the next one is shown. This repetition enables workers to get very good at performing your tasks quickly. That said, it's still important to spend time designing a good user interface for your task to enable Workers to perform even more efficiently, allowing you to lower your costs or increase the effective hourly wage of your workforce without paying more.