
Playment (YC W17) gives companies on-demand workers to analyze data using mobile - rm2904
https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/13/playment-gives-companies-on-demand-workers-to-analyze-data-using-mobile-devices/
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ajinkyamalasane
Hi Guys,

I am Ajinkya (AJ) co-founder Playment. We started Playment as mTurk is highly
unreliable in terms of data output quality or reliability. We focus on the
standardisation of work across workers. In a nutshell we provide enterprise
grade SLAs.

We deploy algorithms to generate high quality crowdsourcing output rather just
grading the workers. Building a mobile workforce makes us faster than any
other existing mTurk like solution. It's an fully managed platform where the
task requester needn't worry about the task design or worker selection or
deciding worker incentives. Everything is managed by the platform itself. Just
share the requirements and data and we do it all.

The use cases that Playment target are cataloging for e-commerce, training
data for AI (text classification, transcription, bounding boxes and image
annotation).

We have written a whole piece on Playment vs. mTurk -
[https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-
turk](https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-turk)

Would appreciate more comments and remarks. Hope you find this useful.

~~~
sarthakjain
Looks promising. AI still has time to go before it can automate complex tasks.
Also training models requires a lot of data, labelled training data is a huge
bottleneck. Are there any other use cases you have planned for AI training
data?

~~~
siddharthmall05
Sid, Cofounder @ Playment here.

Algorithms are only as good as the data that trains them. Besides having basic
product features such as building bounding boxes on the images, identifying
objects from images, context based text classification etc, we could also
support multi step complex workflow. For example, for self driving cars, from
a given image we could first find out if there are pedestrians present or not,
then # of such pedestrians, then build boxes around it and finally tag them as
males and females. To make it even more simple for our customers, we take over
the complete ownership of building such complex workflows and ensuring
quality.

~~~
mshubham1009
Are you guys fixed on some specific usecases or trying to take care of almost
all kinds of workflows?

~~~
siddharthmall05
Workflows have been built in such a way that it could handle multiple action
on a single input. For example, we currently help a leading e-commerce based
in India to do quality check o f the listings that are uploaded before they go
live. The workflow involves more than 10 checks (image is blurry or not,
background is white or not, description matches images, attribute check and so
on) to be done on >3 images/product. All of this is handles by 1 workflow and
output is given in few minutes.

Our platform can currently support services like image tagging, transcription,
text tagging and bounding boxes. And workflows could be built using
combination of these services.

At the end of the day, we have more than 100,000 skilled workers. We would
love to hear more about various use cases that people would need definitely
need humans for. :)

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mshubham1009
Amazing, this thing has the capability to grow almost like Uber. This should
definitely beat Mechanical Turk once it reaches scale.

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ezzaf
I was waiting for the "It's like mechanical turk, but for x" moment, but it
didn't come. Perhaps a gamification twist given the name? Nope, apparently
same same but more flexible for the workforce.

~~~
akl01
Akshay here, co-founder of Playment.

So there are quite a few differences, the primary being the quality & spam
problem that mTurk has. We have a number of quality assurance models which
help us promise enterprise grade SLAs to our customers.

Moreover, mTurk is limited to requesters from a few countries. We don't have
any such restriction.

Also, Our product enables us to stitch together multiple tasks to model
complex multi-step workflows so you don't need to take the hassle of setting
up multiple tasks and compiling their results. Playment just does all of that
for you.

We've put up a comprehensive piece on this: [https://playment.io/playment-vs-
mechanical-turk](https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-turk)

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iamarsene
This looks brilliant. How do you guarantee a fixed SLA ? I can see from your
playstore app that your work force is non predictable as it is crowd-sourced ?
Can you offer huge scale with limited downloads you have ?

~~~
akl01
With the 100k+ downloads we always have thousands of people active on the app
around the clock. We've been able to tag more than a million images in a day;
and that's a fraction of our total capacity. And we've acquired these 100k
downloads with zero marketing spend, so there's enough scope to get more
workers pretty easily :)

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theyeti
Looks quite interesting. This could perhaps give Turkers a much needed
alternative to Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

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nsx147
Sounds like mechanical turk

~~~
siddharthmall05
Three major differences

1) SLA (Quality and turn-around times) assurance

2) Fully managed solution. Just send us the data and guidelines, we take care
of the rest.

3) Support complex workflows

We wrote an elaborate piece on our differentiation against mechanical turk!
Check it out on - [https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-
turk](https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-turk)

