Google announced on Wednesday that the company has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company with an online product used for providing a test that humans can pass and computers generally cannot. A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) tool is used in many places on the internet and often when submitting information to ensure that it is a human submitting the information and not some bot software filling out forms automatically on the internet.

A CAPTCHA program would provide text that is not easily and usually impossible for a automated character recognition program to decipher, but easy enough that a human could identify the letters in the text. The person submitting the information would then enter the text they see to “prove” that they are human and not a machine.