When CAPTCHA tests were first introduced they offered a process to check that someone online was real human and not a bot. But then the bots got clever enough to solve them, resulting in more difficult captcha which are hard to read. And even a bot-immune CAPTCHA can be beaten by a human being paid to solve the text puzzles. CAPTCHAs have long relied on the inability of robots to solve distorted text. But, Google’s recent research showed that today’s Artificial Intelligence tech can solve even the most difficult variant of distorted text at 99.8% accuracy.
Now Google has updated its system called reCAPTCHA and dropped the manual CAPTCHA test. Rather, you just have to simply tick a box to confirm you are human. That may sound like incredibly simple security that any bot could overcome, but the tick box isn’t all, it’s what Google is doing in the backend that makes this system secure and reliable.
On mobile platforms this system works a little bit different. You’ll still get the tick box to tap, but the secondary text will be a picture question/puzzle asking you to select all similar images to the one it presents.
The new API is the next step in this steady evolution. Now, humans can just check the box and in most cases, they’re through the challenge. The updated “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHAs” is already rolling out on websites across the web.
