Everything About Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk)

What is Amazon Mechanical Turk or mTurk?

Amazon Mechanical Turk or mTurk is a marketplace small micro jobs that can’t be done automatically by computers and so require human ideas to complete these small jobs. mTurk allows small businesses and website owners to access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it’s convenient.
Amazon Mechanical Turk is based on the idea that there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, complete a small survey, rate or like a website, share the contents on social media sites, transcribing audio recordings, finding some data online, review a product or site and hundreds of different tasks. Earlier, to complete such tasks you need to hire people on temporary basis which is time consuming and expensive but same thing on Amazon Mechanical Turk is the easier, faster and cheaper.

What‘s the difference between Worker & Requester?

A requester is a person, website owner or a company who provides the tasks to mTurk so that thousands of its workers can see these tasks and complete them. A worker is a person who wants to make money on mTurk & completes the tasks provided by requester.

What is a HIT?

A Human Intelligence Task, or HIT, is nothing but task provided by the requester to be completed. On successful completion of the task, worker gets rewarded.

How do I join mTurk as a Worker?

Visit mTurk signup details for joining this.

How do I complete a HIT?

One you signup, login to your account and view the thousands of HITs available there. Click the “Accept HIT” button while viewing the HIT. Complete the HIT according to its instructions, fill out the form with the results, and click the “Submit HIT” button. After you submit your results for the HIT, another similar HIT will be presented for you to accept.

How do I receive my money?

Once you complete the HIT, the requester will check this and if satisfied approves your HIT. Once Amazon, checks the approval from requester, it transfer the money from requester’s prepaid balance to worker’s Amazon payment account. You can check everything on the dashboard like how many tasks you have completed successfully, how many rejected, how much is the balance etc. Once your account reaches more than US $10, you can ask to withdraw your payment. Its better, you withdraw after every US $100 as there is $4 deduction every time you request a withdrawal. People in India will receive money by INR cheques.

What is a bonus payment?

A bonus is an extra incentive from a Requester. If a requester feel your work is excellent and better than what he wanted, he may choose to pay you extra commission for the same reward you already paid for.

I am from India. How do I receive my payment in INR?

Its good if you are from India. After US dollar, Amazon has INR as the only second currency option and sends all the cheques in INR to Indian people. You will need to provide your birth proof, PAN card, voting card, passport or any other ID proof issued by Govt. You can scan this and send by email or mail your documents to mTurk mailing address. All the information you need to sign up to receive payments in Indian Rupees is provided on the Account Settings page. After your submitted information is verified, you will be eligible to withdraw your money in INR. Amazon will send you the cheque payment on your given verified address.

My task was rejected, what should I do?

A Requester has the right to reject the task if he thinks, its wrong or not satisfactory. But if you feel your answer was right or you did the task successfully, you can directly contact the requester. In most of the cases, requester approves the work if a worker contact him and justify his work.

How much time do I have to work on a HIT?

Requesters can specify a HIT’s “Allotted Time” or how long a worker can hold on to a HIT once he accept the HIT. So once you accept the task, its your responsibility to give the priority to that task and complete that in the allotted time. In many cases, the worker accept this but does not complete so other workers who wants to complete that have no option to complete that. In this case neither you nor other worker completed the HIT and requester does not get his task completed in the reasonable time period. So this ensures that if you did not complete the task in allotted time, the HIT is available to other worker.

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