Amazon Mechanical Turk is one of the web services provided by Amazon that allows Requesters to use the services of a group of workers from various parts of the world. The Requesters are usually programmers and entrepreneurs who need certain tasks that cannot be performed effectively by computers. Examples of these tasks include the writing of product descriptions, the transcription of voice recordings, and elimination of the duplication of data. This web service is being promoted as a cost-effective alternative to IT services because the Requester only has to pay for results that he uses. There are no contracts, long-term commitments, or up-front expenses. Mechanical Turk is based on the principle of crowdsourcing, which is the act of outsourcing tasks to a group of people who may chose to do or not do the tasks. Thus, it is a distributed production model in which an online community is tapped.

Almost anyone who is at least 18 years old and has a computer connected to the Internet can perform Mechanical Turk tasks. On the other hand, anyone can submit a Human Intelligence Task (HIT) that can be done by utilizing an Internet-connected computer. For tasks that require special skills, the person applying to do the task can undergo some tests to ensure that he is qualified for the job. People who work for Mechanical Turk must have an Amazon.com account to take advantage of the security infrastructure used by Amazon for identity and payments. It is also easy to get paid using Mechanical Turk. The payment is automatically deposited into the Amazon.com account of the person who did a task after the completed work has been approved by a Requester.

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.