On Demand Workforce: Amazon's Mechanical Turk

Amazon has made deep forays into the cloud computing arena with EC2 & S3 services that were launched some time ago. Now, expanding the horizons of the cloud computing arena further, Amazon is introducing an on demand workforce platform for all tasks that require human intervention, precisely like the BPO work done by outsourcers.

 Amazon Mechanical Turk (http://aws.amazon.com/mturk/) is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk web service enables companies to programmatically access this marketplace and a diverse, on-demand workforce. Developers can leverage this service to build human intelligence directly into their applications.

 While computing technology continues to improve, there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings or researching data details. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce (which is time consuming, expensive and difficult to scale) or have gone undone. Mechanical Turk aims to make accessing human intelligence simple, scalable, and cost-effective. Businesses or developers needing tasks done (called Human Intelligence Tasks or “HITs”) can use the robust Mechanical Turk APIs to access thousands of high quality, low cost, global, on-demand workers—and then programmatically integrate the results of that work directly into their business processes and systems.

 The kinds of tasks that the companies are outsourcing on the Mechanical Turk website (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome) are amazing – tasks range from identifying missing addresses, cleaning up duplicate entries, indexing images to transcribing recordings and translating passages. Workers can work at their leisure, using the Internet and can make anything from few cents to few dollars per work item successfully completed. Companies can leverage this model to outsource a large volume of repetitive, human intensive work to a global, on-demand workforce and can really do away with any outsourcing relationships or partnerships.

 This is a proof of the continuous in-roads that technology is making into the erstwhile human-intensive tasks. While the work may not disappear in the near future, BPO companies must keep moving up the value chain constantly and leverage technology and tools to their hilt to be successful in the times to come.