URL: Toloka.ai (contains referral code, which does not impact the honest appraisal or content of this review)
Toloka.ai is essentially a "generic brand" version of Remotasks or DataAnnotation that takes online workers from pretty much anywhere, but also pays commensurate with that labor pool. In other words, they pay as if you're in a developing country where $10 USD per day is enough to at least get by off of.
NATURE OF WORK AND PAYMENT
As with what remains of the "microtasks" sites in this day and age, Toloka is largely focused on AI training. The basic tasks that are immediately available (or at least available after a brief training exercise and test) consist of verifying that an image caption description is accurate, comparing two images to determine which is more appealing to the eye, evaluating search results for their relevance, and comparing audio and video clips for quality.
Payments are made by PayPal, Payoneer, Papara or QIWI. You can sign up and get to working (and earning) immediately, but cashing out will require an identity verification process.
SITE HISTORY / LEGITIMACY
Toloka.ai is owned by Yandex, which is Russia's biggest search engine and was based there until early 2024 (when it was sold to a Swiss company). The platform has been active with assorted microtasks since 2014, but was virtually unknown outside of Russia until the past year or two as it has made a concentrated international expansion in the wake of AI LLMs going public.
I know people have their individual feelings about Russia's government, but Yandex is a legitimate business operation with a long history. One thing that should be noted is that there is a clause in the user agreement allowing a ban at any time for any reason, which can (and probably will) result in forfeiture of your unpaid funds. You'll likely have no legal recourse unless you're in the EU or European Economic Zone countries. So just something to consider when you plan your cashouts and how much work you want to take on.
INTERNATIONAL ACCESS
Toloka's big strength is that they appear to accept just about anyone from anywhere, at least for initial access to the platform. You will need one of the payment methods listed above, plus you may need some form of government ID to get paid.
However, the platform mentions that it is in the middle of a shift to an English-only interface. As to when that will happen or if it will mean anyone who does not speak English is frozen out of the system, I cannot find any further detail.
STARTING OUT
You simply sign in with one of the major social media authentication services (such as Google or Facebook, the full list is above in the title screenshot) and you're off and running. There are several basic paying tasks you can take right away, such as comparing audio and video samples. Others require that you go through a short training module and test first to be assigned a qualification (such as search engine relevance and evaluating image captions).
Most of the tasks that require training are gated behind a basic English comprehension test that is straightforward and easy if you're a native speaker or a reasonably skilled second language speaker.
PROBLEMS WITH TOLOKA.AI
The central issue is simply that the pay is very low considering the time the tasks take and the sprawling, detailed instructions you have to continually refer to so as not to make small non-obvious mistakes. And even if you pay careful attention to the instructions, some of the criteria are just plain arbitrary or involve unfair oversights by whoever posted the task.
The biggest example is the category of tasks that asks you to compare the "prettiness" of two pictures and decide which is more appealing. The criteria is so maddeningly arbitrary that I quit during the training portion, refusing to do any more of that task type. The very first one I was flagged for claimed there were "artifacts around the edges" of an image that I literally could not even see.
Evaluating search results makes more sense, but only pays 18 cents for 20 tasks initially (something that will take at least a few minutes) and is laden with its own technical issues. While most of the URLs it has you evaluate are mainstream sites, every batch of 20 seems to have at least one or two that look sketchy and trip browser warnings. They also frequently have dead links, but on the test I was penalized for flagging a dead link as if it was supposed to still be readable. This made me nervous about doing any more tasks of this nature, as the one paid batch I experimented with had a good eight dead links in it! The price of this task seems to go up a little as you take more advanced tests, but I don't see it being good for more than $5 USD per hour IF you get that much work and IF everything goes smoothly.
For all of the available tasks I saw, it's not like the glory days of Mechanical Turk where a HIT would only pay 20 cents but would legitimately take under a minute to complete. At least initially, a more realistic expectation from this platform is 1 to 5 cents per minute, or a whopping 60 cents to $3 for a full hour of work.
FINAL VERDICT - MAY WORK FOR YOU
The "may work for you" in this case depends entirely on your local cost of living, and whether a limit of a few USD per hour (probably under half of federal minimum wage in the US) and probably no more than several hundred USD per month for days of full-time work is useful to you.
I'll include the referral link because I know there are countries where English is frequently spoken and $2-3 USD per hour is actually a useful amount of money if you can work from home (and they do seem to have tasks available 24 hours a day), but anyone in the US, Europe, Canada, Australia etc is getting rooked on their time with what the most basic tasks pay. Regions like Africa, India and the Philippines seem to be more the recruiting focus given the testimonials they display.
In doing some forum research I did see mention of higher-paid positions being offered at times that require degrees/credentials, such as doing detailed editing/evaluation of AI-generated writing. As to how you get to those I don't know; if I get any messages from the platform indicating availability I'll check them out and update this review, but I'm not grinding tasks that essentially pay nothing to get to that.
The only final point of interest for those outside of the "developing world" is that this is a way to get a look at the kind of tasks you can expect from other AI annotation services like Remotasks and DataAnnotation.tech without having to wait on the sometimes very long approval processes of those place. It could serve as a bit of an orientation and training exercise if you're really trying to crack into that type of work.
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