Amazon Mechanical Turk vs Azure Machine Learning: What are the differences?

Developers describe Amazon Mechanical Turk as "Programatically access thousands of high quality, low cost, global, on-demand workers". Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk web service enables companies to programmatically access this marketplace and a diverse, on-demand workforce. Developers can leverage this service to build human intelligence directly into their applications. On the other hand, Azure Machine Learning is detailed as "A fully-managed cloud service for predictive analytics". Azure Machine Learning is a fully-managed cloud service that enables data scientists and developers to efficiently embed predictive analytics into their applications, helping organizations use massive data sets and bring all the benefits of the cloud to machine learning.

Amazon Mechanical Turk belongs to "Crowdsourced Labor" category of the tech stack, while Azure Machine Learning can be primarily classified under "Machine Learning as a Service".

Some of the features offered by Amazon Mechanical Turk are:

• Tag objects found in an image for easier searching / advertising targeting
• Select from a set of images the best picture to represent a product
• Audit user-uploaded images for inappropriate content

On the other hand, Azure Machine Learning provides the following key features:

• Designed for new and experienced users
• Proven algorithms from MS Research, Xbox and Bing
• First class support for the open source language R