Google is really getting into the spirit of Valentine’s Day this year. Not only did they have a doodle, they had a different doodle for the U.S. than they did the rest of the world, and it was a very unique one with audio recordings of people telling “real” love stories.
But it doesn’t end there. Google’s reCAPTCHA of all things is celebrating the day by injecting some Valentine’s Day fun into its puzzles all over the Internet. Across the U.S., it’s sharing CAPCTCHAs like these:
“But wait. These look really easy. Does this mean that those pesky bots are going to crack these easy CAPTCHAs and abuse our favorite websites? Not so fast,” Google says in a blog post. “A few months ago, we announced an improved version of reCAPTCHA that uses advanced risk analysis techniques to distinguish humans from machines. This enabled us to relax the text distortions and show our users CAPTCHAs that adapt to their risk profiles. In other words, with a high likelihood, our valid human users would see CAPTCHAs that they would find easy to solve. Abusive traffic, on the other hand, would get CAPTCHAs designed to stop them in their tracks. It is this same technology that enables us to show these Valentine’s Day CAPTCHAs today without reducing their anti-abuse effectiveness.”
“But that’s not all. Over the last few months, we’ve been working hard to improve the audio CAPTCHA experience,” the company adds. “Our adaptive CAPTCHA technology has, in many cases, allowed us to relax audio distortions and serve significantly easier audio CAPTCHAs. We’ve served over 10 million easy audio CAPTCHAs to users worldwide over the last few weeks and have seen great success rates. We hope to continue enhancing our accessibility option in reCAPTCHA in the months to come.”
You can listen to a sample of that here.
Image via Google