nrc
03-22-10, 02:04 AM
I just switched our forum registration to reCaptcha to try to fend of some of the spam bots. I've seen reCaptcha around for a while now but I just figured it was just another human verification system and didn't think much of it.
Maybe I'm the last to know this but it turns out that they're doing something very cool. They're using it as a way of doing high volume digitizing of text and audio. As they digitize text or audio there are thousands of words that can't be recognized by OCR or speech to text translation.
So they're using these captcha widgets as a massively parallel way to tackle the problem. They provide us with verification that the reader is human and in return they get a human translation of a word that was unreadable by machine.
That's brilliant.
http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html
Maybe I'm the last to know this but it turns out that they're doing something very cool. They're using it as a way of doing high volume digitizing of text and audio. As they digitize text or audio there are thousands of words that can't be recognized by OCR or speech to text translation.
So they're using these captcha widgets as a massively parallel way to tackle the problem. They provide us with verification that the reader is human and in return they get a human translation of a word that was unreadable by machine.
That's brilliant.
http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html