Goodbye, Captcha: Google launches new tool to check if you're a robot

Say “goodbye” to those annoying textboxes with distorted characters, or CAPTCHAs, which aim to check if you are a robot. Google has developed a smarter system that allows people to prove that they are human using tick-boxes that block automated spam software. CAPTCHAs are the scrambled words placed at the the end of any registration form, without which you cannot proceed. In technical terms, CAPTCHA is a computer program which determines whether the user is human or not, as a way to avoid spam and malware that extract data from websites.

Google has introduced a smarter alternative called ‘No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA’ which uses a tick-boxes for humans, rather than the distorted text which you have to decode. It’s specially designed so that spam gets blocked on the page and humans can tick the box and carry on with their work. In a recent blog post, Product Manager of reCAPTCHA at Google explained, “CAPTCHAs have long relied on the inability of robots to solve distorted text. However, our research recently showed that today’s artificial intelligence technology can solve even the most difficult variant of distorted text at 99.8 per cent accuracy. Thus distorted text, on its own, is no longer a dependable test”.  reCAPTCHAs will be easy to use on smartphones too. Users will be asked to select all of the images that correspond with a clue asked. Instead of typing a distorted text on our phones, taping photos of cats and turkeys will be much easier. Many websites including Snapchat, WordPress and Humble Bundle have already adopted the new reCAPTCHA system.