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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.

4 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Why not Chinese prisoners? Even cheaper! by pla · · Score: 4, Interesting

    that crowdsource tasks to workers in India.

    Say, I have this great idea for harvesting more cotton by "crowdsourcing" the task to imported workers from Africa...

    Or does this "merely" mean that child labor has "shifted paradgms" from a reason to boycott a company, to a patentable business method?

  2. Re:Doesn't sound very promising. by Dunbal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Tech support wasn't much better when it was done in the US, in the 1980's. You got the same morons but they cost ten times more. The problem is not India, it's the type of person who lands a job in tech support.

    --
    Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
  3. Re:Why not Chinese prisoners? Even cheaper! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's done on a computer, why not disguise the worker's end of the project as a game? Then you make a Facebook app out of it. Instead of working for money, they get points. With enough points they can dress up their little cartoon character in some virtual swag and do other things in associated mini-games. Of course this is done while keeping in mind to exploit the other aspects of social media and some people's competitive nature. Also if you package it just right, not only can you get free labor but you might even be able to fool people into paying you to do your work.

  4. I don't believe that was the question. by C10H14N2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you are going to make a statement of fair trade and wages, it should be a trivial task to state that in precise terms. It is a fair question to ask, what a typical quantity of hours and remuneration your company considers "fair" in a given locale, say, Delhi, where roughly 300 INR / day (roughly 6 USD) is the legal minimum wage for labor requiring a secondary or higher education. If you cannot directly speak to that in terms that can be reconciled with the local prevailing labor standards, your vague marketing language assurances on the topic are quite worthless.