The latest innovation by the man responsible for the Captcha online security checks has got a new project. Called Duolingo, its aim is to help people learn foreign languages whilst translating everything on the web in just a few years.
It all sounds rather ambitious but, in reality, is just a step on from the ReCaptcha.
Back at the turn of the century, Luis von Ahn created the original Captcha, to use distorted words and numbers to ensure people accessing sites were human.
It was an overnight, though sometimes user-frustrating success, with many SEOs commending the development for generating provable leads.
Having realised that over 200million Captchas were being typed across the world each day and, starting to feel ‘bad’ about it, von Ahn hit upon ReCaptcha.
As a result, books started to become digitised, as people’s response to a second image, taken from images of printed periodicals, were analysed and collated.
Now owned and used by Google Books, ReCaptcha is helping transcribe every printed media in the world. Ever.
Using this model, von Ahn has now developed Duolingo, which aims to reward people through free online language lessons, in return for translating blocks of text.
Presently catering for English speakers learning French, German and Spanish, and Spanish speakers learning English, von Aun estimates that Wikipedia could be translated in just five weeks.
As global communication gets ever more important, the possibility of a real time and accurate translation tool is one many online marketers and those with SEO jobs could well be excited about.
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