Google has announced an improved version of CAPTCHA, called ‘NoCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA.’ The new CAPTCHA is designed to make it easier to prove to a website that you’re actually human. (It’s up to you to prove it to those who love you.)
TNW:
We’ve known CAPTCHAs for years for their awful distorted text that’s hard to read and get right a lot of the time. Google set out to fix that a year and a half ago, when it discovered that it could teach computers how to beat the traditional CAPTCHA with 99.8 percent accuracy and realized that if it could do that, so could others.
The new version offers up a check box that says “I’m not a robot.” If you’re not a robot, simply click the box, and Google performs a number of checks using a “risk analysis engine” to determine if you’re telling the truth.
If the noCAPTCHA decides you’re human, you’re done here, and you can carry on with what you were doing.
If it decides you’re NOT human, you can either tell the website to kiss your shiny metal ass, or you can fill in a more traditional CAPTCHA, or perhaps select the correct image from a series of images, as seen below. (OOOOOH! Cat pics!)
Google believes this will be much easier for mobile users, who can just tap on the option rather than squint at a tiny image.
Vinay Shet, Product Manager for noCAPTCHA, told TNW that there is a “high degree of sophistication” going on behind the scenes.
The new risk analysis engine looks at user engagement before, during and after they click the checkbox to determine your humanity. Shet told us that the risk analysis engine “uses machine learning, that takes a number of strategies and learns what a normal user looks like so that the next time a new one comes along, we know what to look for.”
Shet says not everyone will get to use the new noCAPTCHA experience, as only a “fraction” of users will see it, while a number of users will still see the traditional CAPTCHA while the system learns user habits.
Developers who want to use the new experience will need to use a new API to implement it in their code, however, Google says that consists of just three lines of code.
For more information, visit the Google NoCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA website.
