How to Make Money in Your Spare Time Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk Website

A lot of websites promise to allow just about anyone to make money from home, but unfortunately, legitimate work-from-home opportunities seem to be few and far between. One of the reasons that Associated Content is so popular is that it allows ordinary people to produce honest income in their spare time. Now, a website that was quietly launched by Amazon.com called Mechanical Turk (mTurk for short) is promising people another way to make money using their home computers.

The idea behind Amazon's Mechanical Turk website, which can be found at http://www.mturk.com, is that there are some tasks which, by design, are extremely hard for computers to perform yet extremely easy for humans to do. For instance, computers cannot look at a picture of a shirt and tell what color it is, which is something that most people can easily do in just a second. Another example would be listening to a snippet of audio: most humans can easily type the words that they hear accurately, while speech recognition software is notoriously unreliable and error-prone.

Granted, these aren't very hard jobs to do, but as more companies "go digital,"someone has to do them and Amazon has created the mTurk site to connect willing workers with these tasks that need to be completed. Here's how it works: after setting up an mTurk account (which is just like registering for any other website, and is even quicker if you already have a shopping account with Amazon.com), you can log-in and see a list of jobs available to you. Each job, called a Human Interaction Task or HIT, has a complete set of instructions attached to it and also has a "reward" amount, which is the payment you receive if your successfully complete the HIT.