Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace where individuals and businesses, called Requesters, break work into small tasks and assign them to a distributed, on-demand workforce of Workers. A single task is called a Human Intelligence Task (HIT). The platform addresses work that is repetitive or difficult to automate, such as data validation, research, survey participation, content moderation, categorization, and data collection, and it can also support machine learning workflows through data collection, annotation, and human-in-the-loop feedback.

Requesters can create and manage HITs through a flexible Requester UI or integrate programmatically using the MTurk Requester API with the AWS SDK. The UI supports single and batch creation, including CSV uploads for publishing many HITs at once, and offers sample templates defined in HTML/JS/CSS that can be modified or started from scratch. Surveys hosted on external tools such as Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey can be posted as well. Qualifications, including custom and MTurk-supplied types, let Requesters control which Workers can view and work on tasks.

MTurk is aimed at individuals, businesses, researchers, and developers who need distributed human input for microtasks. Pricing is usage-based: Requesters pay a Worker reward per assignment plus an MTurk fee calculated as a percentage of that reward, with additional fees for batch HITs, Masters Qualification, and Premium Qualifications.