Ever filler in an online form and had to type in a group of letters that usually makes no sense and/or is hard to read? That is called a CAPTCHA and apparently about 60 million are used by humans every day!

A captcha is an abbreviation for ‘Completely automated turing test to tell computers and humans apart’, and is used to reduce spam.

Someone has now come up with a way to make use of that time and effort.

There are many books that are being converted to digital formats via software that can read the symbols in writing. However, this OCR software can’t always resolve every word.

With reCAPTCHA, every time you solve a code to submit anything in an online form, you will be solving one of those unresolved words! With 60 million solutions a day, we can greatly decrease the time require to digitalise those books, and it costs us nothing extra in time or effort!

If you like this idea, you can add reCAPTCHA to your site instead of CAPTCHA - there are even plugins to use it with Wordpress and mediawiki, and simple code for php sites.

The full explanation and codes for reCAPTCHA are available at recaptcha.net.

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