Are You A Human Aims To Replace CAPTCHA With Micro-Games

We've all been there. No matter how good your vision is, if you spend any amount of time on a computer, you've had at least one experience of not being able to read what the heck those garbled inhuman words on those CAPTCHA screens are supposed to be. Now, a company called Are You a Human, is looking for a new standard that will alleviate frustration from both website owners and end users.

The company has released an authentication tool called PlayThru. Instead of trying to decipher the hidden words, players complete a very simple game – such as dragging and dropping toppings onto a pizza – to verify that they are not some sort of automated bot trying to cripple the website's servers with bogus requests. Quicken Loans is among the biggest clients that Are You a Human has signed on so far. It says more than 2 million 'authentication games' have been processes to date.

"Text-based CAPTCHAs are difficult to decipher and easy to break, which forces them to become increasingly more difficult to solve. This vicious cycle makes it frustrating for users, who many times will give up before following through to a site," the company's COO Reid Tatoris was quoted as saying. According to Are You a Human, around 20% of online users will leave a site when they encounter the dreaded CAPTCHA. It hopes that the PlayThru standard will retain those users.

[via VentureBeat]