Google's Crowdsource App Ask Your Help for Transcriptions and Translations.
Google is watching to users for helping out with one of the most irritating tasks on the web. Crowdsource is a new app that asks users to translate and transcript text or images. Crowdsource has quietly looked on Google Play, asking users to do brief tasks that will help improve the quality of Google services like translation, Maps, image transcription, and more.
If we are fluent in just one language, the app asks us to help image transcription or recognition of poorly handwritten samples. In case we are fluent in more languages, we can help Google by verifying the already existing translations for text and Maps data or create new ones.
Though Google has a devoted research team for artificial intelligence, this sort of crowdsourcing should result in better results as difficulties related with language can be better resolved at a local level rather than at a macro level.
Unlike the Google Opinion Rewards application that gives users free Play Store credit for just filling out a few questions, Crowdsource offers no such reward. Though, if we have just a minute or two to kill, then we can easily help Google out and feel good about it in the end.
That doesn’t mean people won’t use it. A lot of folks are passionate about helping to improve the apps they use on a daily basis. A Google spokesperson told TechCrunchthat “people may be inclined to use [Crowdsource] because, for many languages, tools like Translate, Image Recognition, etc. aren’t very good right now.”
Of course, if Google needs people to stick with Crowdsource, it’ll have to do more than just hand out simulated trophies. The company says that the app isn’t actually finished yet and that it’s “thinking through incentives” now.
Google Crowdsource app description on Play Store,
“Each microtask takes no more than 5-10 seconds, so knock away a few the next time you find yourself with a few moments to kill – be it while waiting in line at the grocery store or on the train ride home. Every time you use it, you know that you’ve made the internet a better place for your community”
It looks like Google has become very fond of crowdsourcing in the recent past, as the company also declared(http://gadgets.ndtv.com/wearables/news/google-wants-your-designs-for-its-new-android-wear-watch-faces-1451680) that it is crowdsourcing the watch face designs for its Android Wear Collection for the fall as it introduced a contest to receive entries byInstagram.