Google's reCAPTCHA -- a notoriously incomprehensible system of weeding out robots and spam online, requiring users to decipher distorted text -- is getting an upgrade.
"We figured it would be easier to just directly ask our users whether or not they are robots — so, we did!" product manager Vinay Shet wrote in a Wednesday blog post.
The new “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” system is based on an Advanced Risk Analysis engine which will simply allow a "significant number of users" to check a box saying they are, in fact, not robots. Shet said Snapchat, WordPress and others have adopted the changed.
But the original CAPTCHAs aren't going away just yet, Shet said, and will appear in cases where the new engine cannot accurately predict a user's humanness. New CAPTCHA challenges, such as image labeling, are also being tested.
"It's much easier to tap photos of cats or turkeys than to tediously type a line of distorted text on your phone," Shet said.
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