[Argorak]

That was the original goal of the project.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA

"By presenting two words it both protects websites from bots attempting to access restricted areas[2] and helps digitize the text of books."

For some time, you could pass a reCAPTCHA test by just entering the more distorted word correctly.

[willlma]

This should be the top thread. I find the whole topic of crowdsourcing to compensate for the inadequacies of computer vision (and other inadequacies) fascinating. OCR was the first problem. We've been helping Google Maps identify house addresses for a while now with reCaptcha, and with this announcement it looks like Google is finally tackling the problem of image association. Computers suck at determining which pictures contain birds. By making users tag all of the images on the web, they're making image search much more powerful and will hopefully improve the entire field of computer vision.

When I tell my future robot to go get my coffee mug, I don't want it coming back with the PS5 controller.

[verroq]

I only ever enter the distorted one, works every time.