Google announced that it’s rolling out an API for reCAPTCHA, which it has dubbed “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA”.
It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything much about reCAPTCHA. Google acquired the company in 2009, and has since been using it to make the CAPTCHA experience on websites less annoying, among other things. A couple years, ago, they started using it to crowdsource Street View addresses.
Fast forward to today, and Google is giving sites and apps an API so they can have users easily verify that they’re humans. Instead of solving CAPTCHAs they can confirm with one click.
It always seemed like there had to be a better way, didn’t it?
“CAPTCHAs aren’t going away just yet,” Google notes, however. ‘In cases when the risk analysis engine can’t confidently predict whether a user is a human or an abusive agent, it will prompt a CAPTCHA to elicit more cues, increasing the number of security checkpoints to confirm the user is valid.”
“This new API also lets us experiment with new types of challenges that are easier for us humans to use, particularly on mobile devices,” the company says. “In the example below, you can see a CAPTCHA based on a classic Computer Vision problem of image labeling. In this version of the CAPTCHA challenge, you’re asked to select all of the images that correspond with the clue. It’s much easier to tap photos of cats or turkeys than to tediously type a line of distorted text on your phone.”
Snapchat, WordPress, and Humble Bundle are already using the new API, so users should start seeing the new method in place.
Image via Google