Today’s world is incomplete without phone applications. Every day or in fact every hour, there must be a new application being launched on Google playstore. So going with the app flow, a new application by Google which is known as Crowdsource is asking users to perform small tasks which will help in improving the quality of Google services like Maps, translation, image transcription, and more. All these services are widely being used by everyone.
But this app doesn’t provide any kind of rewards in exchange of your efforts. On the other side, this also means that it won’t be much of a threat to workforce platforms like Mechanical Turk by Amazon. The whole and sole reason for launching Crowdsource is to improve Google services. This app will actually help everyone.
Crowdsource was first identified on playstore by Android Police. Google then confirmed to TechCrunch that it is their pilot project.
What does Crowsource ask?
Crowdsource asks users to select their comfortable languages which they fluently speak. This leads to translation requests. Not only this, the app also features large buttons to let you choose from a list of micro-tasks like image transcription, translation, handwriting recognition and translation validation. This also includes map translation validation.
Sometimes, it does feel awkward that such an app has been launched by Google which doesn’t offer anything to its users. It would just be a good idea to give rewards which will encourage genuine participation and contribution.
Something like Google Opinion Awards, which offers Google Play credits in exchange for answering free surveys can be quite helpful. Again, on the other side, Google services are being used globally and are being very helpful. So Google might consider this as a service from the users for making Google services even better, which indirectly will again help the users itself!
It was asked that why will people use an app like Crowdsource, a Google spokesperson replied: “people may be inclined to use [Crowdsource] because, for many languages, tools like Translate, Image Recognition, etc. aren’t very good right now.”
The application does not take more than 15 seconds to complete the tasks and it has some weird stuff which is always the most hated ones on the Internet. For example, figuring out some blurred photograph reads.
It is not the first time that Google has relied on crowdsourcing, back in 2006, Google launched a game known as Google Image Labeler which asked users to tag images.
Crowdsource as expected is a free download on Google playstore and there isn’t any iOS version available for it. So all you iPhone users don’t need to worry about any such contributions to Google.
