Croon My Tune – Create A Singing Greeting Using Mechanical Turk

I was on the east coast of the US last week and spent a very pleasant day at the Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference in Philadelphia. As a native of the city is always great to go back. During my all too brief time in the city I spoke at the conference, met with a couple of developers, and had time for a cheese steak at Sonny’s Famous Steaks in Old City.

While at the conference I heard about a really cool and unique use for the Mechanical Turk and I just had to share it with you!

The application is called Croon My Tune. It runs on EC2 and also makes use of SimpleDB, S3, and Amazon Payments. You can use it to create short, entertaining greetings.

You can choose from a number of well known tunes:

Then you enter your message:

You then pay for your croon using Amazon Payments and wait for an email message to indicate that it is ready!

A Mechanical Turk HIT (Human Intelligence Task) is created and your croon will be created within a half-day or so (actually, mine took just 36 minutes):

The finished croon is stored in Amazon S3 and can be played directly. Here’s mine!

Is that cool, or what?

— Jeff;