Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Amazon Updates Mechanical Turk

Seattle-based Amazon Web Services, the web services subsidiary of Amazon.com, said today that it has launched a new set of tools for the firm's Amazon Mechanical Turk services. Mechanical Turk is a play on "The Turk," a late 18th century chess playing machine which turned out to be powered by a hidden operator. Amazon's service allows companies to tap human workers to get tasks done. The firm said it has added a new, web-based graphical interface for helping businesses outsource work through the service. The new interface also includes templates for different kind of work available through the service; previously, the service was only available via APIs which required programming expertise. Amazon's Mechanical Turk services are being used for such things as image tagging, filtering, and other tasks which humans do better than computers.