[timdierks]

This is irrelevant. Speech-to-text costs $0.006 per invocation (for < 15 seconds) [1], or you can solve 166 captchas for $1. There are already services out there which will solve captchas for $0.50/1000 [2], an order of magnitude cheaper. The fact that Google has a service which will do this inefficiently changes nothing about the threat/cost ecosystem. CAPTCHAs aren't about being a perfect defense, they're about increasing cost to operate at scale.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/pricing

[2] https://2captcha.com/, the first hit I found with the search [captcha solving serving price]

Disclosure: I work for Google on security and cloud, but not on anything related to captchas or speech to text.

[dessant]

There are free speech recognition services, such as Wit.ai, and a number of others that have generous free tiers. Also, it's likely that spammers will not bother finding a free public API, and will just use the endpoints of Google Voice Search, or any other similar service from other companies.

The unCaptcha paper and the team's research is very much relevant, because it informs the public about the effectiveness of these security systems, and it helps website admins consider these threats and possibly adapt to them.

[kaffee]

I would love to pay money (or do some sort of proof-of-work hashing) rather than solve Google's infuriating, privacy-hostile CAPTCHAs. I rather suspect that Google, as an advertising and consumer-surveillance firm, gets rather a lot of information out of the system.

[Rebelgecko]

I definitely preferred it when recaptcha was helping archive.org digitize books for the good of humanity. Felt much more altruistic than helping Google train neural network.

[bscphil]

That's a funny, very accurate point. I would absolutely pay 10c to have a service automatically bypass Google's CAPTCHA for me every time I encounter one.

[beardog]

They do train their AIs on the system, which is why we solve for so many store fronts, fire hydrants, etc.

[notbestcomment]

From your link, it actually says $2.99 per 1000 ReCaptchas so $0.30 for 100. Still cheaper than the automated method of the author.

Also, the automated method is probably more reliable than humans and much faster. And the cost of the speech-to-text API could be lowered by using cheaper services or an in-house model.

(Looking at other services, they all seem to agree on the $0.20-$0.40 range, mostly dictated by the hourly wage of their workers)