
Show HN: Scale is an API for human tasks - ayw
http://scaleapi.com
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ayw
Hi HN! We're really excited to share Scale with all of you. Our goal is to
make it really easy for startups to integrate human tasks and BPO into their
companies. Give us a try (your first 10 requests are free)! And contact us if
you think you might have a use case we don't cover yet.

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kim0
So how is this different from mturk?

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charlieegan3
Mturk requesters must be in the US. Or have a US billing address. This doesn't
appear to have such a restriction.

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aznpwnzor
Maybe I'm skimming too fast, but what tasks are possible? If anything is
possible, how do I determine the level of detail required in my request?

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ayw
For now we support categorization, transcription, and phone calls (which are
each pretty broad categories and can be used for a wide variety of tasks). You
can see our docs here: [http://docs.scaleapi.com/](http://docs.scaleapi.com/)

We're intentionally releasing endpoint by endpoint in a way that we can ensure
our members can perform the tasks efficiently while also providing a ton of
flexibility to the developer. Our end goal, of course, is to allow developers
to do basically anything.

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effinggames
How does it work with pricing being $0.50/request but requests can take wildly
different amounts of time? e.g. making a phone call

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ayw
One of our goals is to be able to provide flat, predictable pricing to
developers so it's extremely easy for them to integrate.

For now, the $.50 flat pricing has been working well, because most phone calls
are pretty limited in length/scope. If we notice a larger variance in the time
of our phone calls, though, we might slightly change the pricing scheme.

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ReedJessen
Love the concept. How about web snooping? Like "verify whether or not this
person worked at this job on this date"?

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ayw
That seems feasible as long as you give very explicit instructions to the
person performing the task. I'm not sure if I could do that without
instructions!

