Access Amazon Mechanical Turk - Amazon Mechanical Turk
Use the Mechanical Turk Requester UIUse the Mechanical Turk APIUse the AWS CLI

Access Amazon Mechanical Turk

You can access Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mechanical Turk) using the Mechanical Turk requester user interface, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or the Mechanical Turk API.

Use the Mechanical Turk Requester UI

The Mechanical Turk Requester User Interface (RUI) provides access to Mechanical Turk functionality using a graphical user interface. You can use the Mechanical Turk RUI to:

  • Create projects that define tasks you want workers to complete

  • Submit batches of tasks to the Mechanical Turk marketplace

  • Monitor and review the results of batches

  • Approve and reject task submissions

  • Manage workers

  • Create and modify qualification types

For more information on using the RUI, visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk Requester UI Guide.

HITs created from the API or AWS CLI cannot be viewed from the Requester UI.

Use the Mechanical Turk API

The AWS SDKs provide broad support for Mechanical Turk in Java, JavaScript in the browser, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, C++, and Go. To get started quickly with many of these languages, see the Amazon Mechanical Turk Code Samples.

Before you can use the AWS SDKs with Mechanical Turk, you must get an AWS access key ID and secret access key. For more information, see Set up Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Use the AWS CLI

You can use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to control multiple AWS services from the command line and automate them through scripts. This includes posting Mechanical Turk HITs and retrieving results, either on an ad-hoc basis or within utility scripts.

Before you can use the AWS CLI with Mechanical Turk, you must get an access key ID and secret access key. For more information, see Get an AWS access key.

For a complete listing of all the commands available for Mechanical Turk in the AWS CLI, see the AWS CLI Command Reference.

Download and configure the AWS CLI

The AWS CLI is available at https://aws.amazon.com/cli. It runs on Windows, MacOS, or Linux. After you download the AWS CLI, follow these steps to install and configure it:

Use the AWS CLI with Mechanical Turk

The command line format consists of a Mechanical Turk operation name followed by the parameters for that operation. The AWS CLI supports a shorthand syntax for the parameter values, as well as JSON.

For example, the following command returns a list of the HITs that have been created for in your account. 


$ aws mturk list-hits

The next command creates a new HIT in the Mechanical Turk marketplace (for easier readability, long commands in this section are broken into separate lines).

Important

Creating the following HIT results in a charge of $0.12 to your account.


$ aws mturk create-hit \
         --title "Describe the weather" \
         --description "Describe the current weather where you live" \
         --reward "0.10" \
         --lifetime-in-seconds 14400 \
         --assignment-duration-in-seconds 300 \
         --question '<HTMLQuestion xmlns="http://mechanicalturk.amazonaws.com/AWSMechanicalTurkDataSchemas/2011-11-11/HTMLQuestion.xsd">
                    <HTMLContent><![CDATA[
                    <!DOCTYPE html>
                    <script src="https://assets.crowd.aws/crowd-html-elements.js"></script>
                    <crowd-form>
                    <p>Describe the current weather where you live</p>
                    <p><textarea name="weather" cols="80" rows="3"></textarea></p>
                    </crowd-form>
                    ]]>
                    </HTMLContent>
                    <FrameHeight>0</FrameHeight>
                    </HTMLQuestion>'

This returns the attributes of the HIT you created. After the task is completed, you can retrieve the results by using the ListAssignmentsForHIT operation. 


$ aws mturk list-assignments-for-hit \
          --hit-id <The HITId from the previous step>

On the command line, it can be difficult to compose valid HTML for your task when calling CreateHIT. However, the AWS CLI can read XML files. For example, consider the following, which creates a HIT using a question stored in a file question.xml. 


$ aws mturk create-hit \
     --title "Describe the weather" \
     --description "Describe the current weather where you live" \
     --reward "0.10" \
     --lifetime-in-seconds 14400 \
     --assignment-duration-in-seconds 300 \
     --question file://question.xml