Amazon spruces up Mechanical Turk tools

Web giant makes it easier to recruit an on-demand workforce

Web giant Amazon is to make it easier for businesses to employ its army of volunteers, who are willing to carry out mundane tasks for a pittance – but this is far from sweatshop labour.

Amazon has released a new set of web-based tools that make it easier for businesses to access its Mechanical Turk service.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk allows users to volunteer for tasks, known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs). These can range from categorising and arranging blog posts to rating baseball players. In return volunteers receive a modest stipend.

The system is designed to make it easier for businesses to outsource simple but useful tasks as and when needed. But until now, the process of creating a HIT required some programming skill.

"With these new web-based tools, any business, in just a few minutes, can submit work that requires human intelligence to a workforce of hundreds of thousands workers from over one hundred countries," said Sharon Chiarella, vice president of Amazon Mechanical Turk.