Digitizing Books One Word at a Time

Opinion
May 25, 20071 min

reCAPTCHA is an effort by the Carnegie Mellon University to use those little security programs called CAPTCHAs to correct OCR errors in the Internet Archive project.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

Visit: Stop Spam. Read Books.