The Amazon Mechanical Turk is a web service that a permits humans to assist computers in performing certain tasks that the machines can not be relied on to do effectively. Despite the advancement in computing technology, humans are still capable of doing certain things more effectively. These include the de-duplication of data, the identification of objects in a video or photograph, researching data, and the transcription of audio recordings.

Through the application programming interfaces (APIs) of the Mechanical Turk, Requesters can have access to thousands of on-demand workers from various parts of the globe. The Requesters can then integrate the results into their business systems. In this manner, Mechanical Turk allows businesses and application developers to accomplish their goals much faster and at a lesser cost.

The tasks that Requesters need are termed as Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs. The HITs are specifically defined with regards to the kind of output, format of the output, and the price that the Requester is willing to pay when the task is finished. The workers can be requested to pass a certain test if the work needs special skills. Quality is assured because the Requester need only pay for work that passes his quality standards.

Mechanical Turk has been found to be useful for certain categories. These include photo and video processing, data verification and clean up, information gathering, and data processing. With regards to pricing, there is no up-front free and the Requester only pays for output that he can use. Amazon Mechanical Turk gets a 10 percent commission based on the amount paid for each HIT with a minimum commission of one-half cent for every HIT.