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You're translating books
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Internet and Technology |
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You know those annoying letter puzzles that you sometimes have to solve in order to login to a site or set up an account? If you solve them and we most always do, you're about to help Google & Gutenberg translate old text from books. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a art like science, but some of the old text and script just refuses to be translated properly by the software. Computer Scientist Luis von Ahn came up with an obvious solution. Have humans help! How? The classic solution is to distribute the scanned texts to the Internet and have volunteers look at it, but van Ahn had another way to help. He noted that the distribution network could be augmented by us! 05/03/2009 11:00 PM
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von Ahn noted that over 500,000 hours are wasted per day having humans break those nasty codes in order to set up accounts or log into their web banking account. Why not use them! Put the nasty text in front of people and see how they do. Have you noticed that sometimes your first crack at the puzzle fails and you get an easier and easier one as you make more mistakes? They are using you, but for a good cause. Well, that's exactly what's happening. We're doing some of the the translation of some texts and the use of this technology will help Google/Gutenberg translate a lot of the world's books. See Project Gutenberg and Google Books
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