It depends what you define as robust tools. They do appear to...

It depends what you define as robust tools. They do appear to have a reasonably sound infrastructure setup to manage their crowd (circa 400k ppl I believe), but I don't really have a basis for comparison as I'm not a contractor with any competitor, ie Lionbridge or anyone else. Appen have been in the space longer than any competitor so guessing their infrastructure, etc is superior to competitors, ie not only in terms of how they recruit and manage contractors, but how they have them record data.

Interestingly, yes, some of the projects I get emailed about these days (as opposed to say a couple of years ago) are more around identification of images, sounds, etc, rather than say, just rating a set of Facebook search results, etc. I don't take part in the tasks that often these days as they can be onerous and the pay isn't great, but they were interesting when I had a bit more spare time a year or so ago, but I still receive the emails regularly.

Not sure how Figure 8 is improving the automation side of things, haven't got a detailed understanding of the different technical aspect they contribute to the group (aside from obviously deepening Appen's existing client base, adding to revenues, etc).

I read an interesting research report around November last year that suggested the industry (annotation and data for enhancing AI functionality) was likely to fragment into specialist providers down the track ie, ag science players wanting to partner with providers who were expert in labelling/refining data in that field, and other businesses that were expert in automotive annotation partnering with automotive businesses, ie Uber, etc. Can sort of understand that, and liken the concept to the recruitment industry, where you have several very large main global players, ie Hays, Robert Walters, Randstad, etc, that are typically classed as "generalist" in this case "Appen" and a number of more specialist firms that just work a particular niche and/or industry.

Appen is in many ways a kind of contract/casual recruitment business.