In a race against time, you quickly load a website to purchase a pair of concert tickets before they get sold out. After selecting seats, all you need to do is enter your credit card info. Then the CAPTCHA appears, the hard-to-read series of letters and numbers that lets the site know you are not a robot. But the letters trip you up (is that a "r" and "n" or just a "m"?), and no matter how many times you refresh, you can't decipher the combinations. When you finally get through, your tickets are sold out.
Nothing is more annoying than having to fill out the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart (CAPTCHA) to access a website. Computers are not supposed to able to read the letter combinations, which weeds out spam robots, while humans should be able to read them easily. Not only are these codes annoying for humans, but thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, computer programs can now read even the most complicated combinations with a 99.8% accuracy.
That got Google's wheels turning. If computers can read the code, than maybe there is a better way to tell users and robots apart.
Instead of using the squiggly letters of CAPTCHA codes, Google announced on Wednesday that users will simply check a box that reads, "I'm not a robot."
Google began working on the reCAPTCHA project 18 months ago by developing an advanced risk analysis engine that could determine who attempted to pass a CAPTCHA code. Using a few clues, such as where the mouse was on the screen, how long the mouse moved on the screen, how steady the mouse was, what website the user was coming from, and other clues Google won't give away, the advanced program was able to tell the difference between a robot and a real user in just seconds.
"All of this gives us a model of how a human behaves," says Vinay Shet, the product manager for Google's reCAPTCHA team. "It's a whole bag of cues that make this hard to spoof for a bot."
While the new system doesn't work for all attempts, "a significant fraction of users" will no longer have to type in the tricky, squiggly letters and can instead check a box.
"For most users, this dramatically simplifies the experience," says Shet. "They basically get a free pass. You can solve the CAPTCHA without having to solve it."
Google is offering the technology for free, and it is currently already being used by Wordpress, Snapchat and Humble Bundle.
In some cases when the simple click doesn't provide a conclusive non-robot response, a popup window will appear where users will have to type in the squiggly text. However, these cases are rare.
"In the last week more than 60% of WordPress traffic and more than 80% of Humble Bundle's traffic has encountered the NoCAPTCHA experience," Shet writes.
Google is also making the CAPTCHA codes easier for smartphone and tablet users. While a single click has not yet been mastered, smartphone users will now be shown a series of images and will be asked to make distinctions.
[Photo Credit: Phil Whitehouse/Flickr]
