Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Crowdsourcing Makes an API For Human Intelligence

Posted by timothy on from the if-intelligence-were-common-we'd-all-have-it dept.

holy_calamity writes "A startup called MobileWorks claims to offer human-level intelligence to any piece of software, with APIs for image, text or speech processing that crowdsource tasks to workers in India. Unlike Amazon's Mechanical Turk, jobs can be sent in by software without human help and can also be completed in 'real time' with a turnaround of a few seconds. The company claims that for problems like OCR and image recognition it makes more sense to find ways to use human intelligence than developing complex custom algorithms." Not a bad plan — sounds like they've lifted a page from the business model of captcha-cracking spammers.

2 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why not Chinese prisoners? Even cheaper! by prayag · · Score: 5, Informative

    I will just leave this here http://www.mobileworks.com/fairtradework.html Full disclosure: I am one of the founders.

  2. Re:Why not Chinese prisoners? Even cheaper! by prayag · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's not. We believe that paying fair wages would improve the quality of the work which is a very import value proposition for us.