How many times have you been asked on the internet to prove that you are a human, prompted to retype letters or numbers, only to be unable to decipher them?

This is a common practice on the internet and the technology used to make sure you are not a robot is called reCAPTCHA, and up until now has probably caused a fair amount of annoyance.

That is why Google has updated it with the goal of making sure the text is easy to read, while still being able to know whether someone is actually a person. The product manager for reCAPTCHA at Google is Vinay Shet, and he elaborated  more about the updated system in a blog.

“The updated system uses advanced risk analysis techniques, actively considering the user’s entire engagement with the CAPTCHA, before, during and after they interact with it. That  means that today the distorted letters serve less as a test of humanity and more as a medium of engagement to elicit a broad range of cues that characterize humans and bots,” he wrote.

He continues on with, “as a part of this, we’ve recently released an update that creates different classes of CAPTCHAs for different kinds of users. This multifaceted approach allows us to determine whether a potential user is actually a human or not, and serve our legitimate users CAPTCHAs that most of them will find easy to solve. Bots, on the other hand, will see CAPTCHAs that are considerably more difficult and designed to stop them from getting through.”

[via arstechnica]