Crowdsourcing sites: the best places to find humans with the intelligence and skills needed to accomplish online tasks that AI can’t do just yet. An increasing number of businesses and people are outsourcing work to crowdsourcing companies to for quick and affordable solutions to their tech problems. Perhaps you’re are looking for clean, labelled training data. Or maybe you’re looking for a specific kind of API. With the myriad of platforms out there, what’s the best way to differentiate between services to suit your needs?

Here’s a basic list to get you started:

Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. AMT is best for simple, small tasks with minimal management efforts.

Consider AMT the original workhorse of all crowdsourcing platforms. It was an early player in the field, and for many, it’s still the first place they turn to, especially for smaller tasks. It’s also cost competitive, relying on a pool of almost infinite cheap labor.

However, be wary of hidden costs. Project managers have to set up the workflow and source workers from scratch, which can be extremely time consuming. AMT offers very little in terms of quality control. Because it’s an open platform, anyone with a stable internet connection can sign up and complete tasks.

With a strong background in translation services, Lionbridge AI’s specialty is any task language-related. Similar to Mechanical Turk, the Lionbridge AI platform is suitable for many different crowd services, including transcription, content generation, moderation and sentiment analysis. The company also manages the entire process, from designing a custom workflow to sourcing qualified workers specifically for your project.

Lionbridge benefits from its large workforce: more than 500,000+ people each in the 300+ languages provided. Most of their semi- professional hired labour are better skilled than the average Mechanical Turk worker, undergo a more thorough vetting process and are subject to ongoing checks.

Scale API takes the basic structure of AMT, and upgrades it a little. Like Lionbridge AI, it vets its workers, and pays them by the hour, instead of by task completed. A client can send data to Scale API for refinement via API.

The company is particularly useful for sales call categorization, transcription services, and object tagging for autonomous vehicles.

You may recognize this company under its old name ‘Crowdflower’. The company rebranded itself in March 2018 to Figure Eight, its new logo a nod to ‘human-in-the-loop’.

Unlike other brands that focus primarily on data, Figure Eight pivots more towards consulting and and helping a client implement machine learning.They don’t have their own in-house workers, and instead work with channel partners to source their workforce. It’s a bit more expensive to use than AMT.

Appen offers a wide variety of services to technology companies, including: annotation, content moderation,categorization, personalization, transcription, and translation.

It has around 400,000 people in over 130 countries working that work in more than 180 languages and dialects.

CloudFactory is a cloud-based platform that provides machine learning, document transcription and data enrichment services. Its strengths include categorization, moderation transcription, and web research.

The company practises ‘Impact Sourcing’, or intentionally employing people in low-income areas. Many of its cloud workers operate in Kenya and Nepal.

Samasource provides hands-on project management for large datasets, with a business model that lifts people out of poverty. Its services include categorization, copywriting, and data collection.

Like Cloud Factory, it also practises ‘Impact Sourcing’, and employs 8,000 people in Kenya, Uganda, India, and Haiti.

This is paid crowdsourcing marketplace that provides work assignments to over 1.2 million ‘Clickworkers’.

The company offers categorization, data extraction, copywriting, and data collection.

This company is specifically designed for all thing autonomous vehicles-related. It has many verified and trusted annotators who specialize in autonomous driving data.

Its solutions include object localization and detection, semantic segmentation, road and lane marking annotation etc.

DataPure has a team of 200+ full-time highly trained employees that cater to your needs. Each employee is vetted and trained for almost a month when hired.

Its strengths include categorization, cleaning, and autonomous vehicle labels.

Lionbridge AI provides professional crowdsourcing services in 300 languages. Translation, copywriting, content moderation, sentiment analysis, and data categorization are just a few of the crowd services we provide.

Interested to see how we can work for you? Contact our sales team to learn more.