Crowdsourcing Makes an API For Human Intelligence

Posted by timothy on Monday August 29, 2011 @11:44AM 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.

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Douglas Adams Correct by Crashmarik · 2011-08-29 12:11 · Score: 4, Insightful

People will never be replaced by robots, because people are cheaper and you don't need to fix them when they break
Re:Why not Chinese prisoners? Even cheaper! by dakameleon · 2011-08-29 12:44 · Score: 3, Insightful

You've made two claims there that you have no evidence for.
1. That they're not doing this voluntarily.
2. That they don't agree to the salary.

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Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.