CAPTCHA’s Are Cool?!December 28th, 2011

A few months ago, I went to the Ann Arbor Tech meetup that showcased 5 new startups in Michigan. One of them was Are You A Human, which aims at making the web authentication process of the past more engaging and less annoying. They do this by having a user solve a puzzle to prove that you are in fact a human (and not a robot). I thought this was great and it would solve the near traumatizing experience that one may encounter while trying to solve an original CAPTCHA or similar word puzzles.

I believed Are You A Human had a great idea, so this must be the way of the future. That was until, I watched a TED Talk from Luis von Ahn, who was on the team that developed the first CAPTCHA. Their newer project reCAPTCHA takes CAPTCHA and turns the idea around for a good cause, and I bet you had no idea! When you solve a reCAPTCHA you are working with Google to “digitize textual documents”.

Answers to reCAPTCHA challenges are used to digitize textual documents. It’s not easy, but through a sophisticated combination of multiple OCR programs, probabilistic language models, and most importantly the answers from millions of humans on the internet, reCAPTCHA is able to achieve over 99.5% transcription accuracy at the word level. See for yourself!

Needless to say this Ted Talk changed the way I looked at those annoying CAPTCHs.

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