Google Crowdsource – Gamifiying Online Information Crowdsourcing

Google Crowdsource – Gamifiying Online Information Crowdsourcing

The term crowdsourcing refers to a method of actionable community engagement that seeks to harness the collective wisdom, knowledge, contributions, and capabilities of large groups of people in society. Crowdsourcing has been used by companies and organisations to solicit, improve, and

address complex virtual and real-world challenges. This has helped to develop innovation and foster creativity while building on an ever-expanding, accurate and credible knowledge base. Crowdsourcing has been proven to help solve complex multi-layered problems within short spans of time.

According to gamification expert, Yu Kai Chou, “Crowdsourcing utilizes several core behavioral drives that compel users to collectively work together to solve problems (sometimes by breaking them into tedious, and manageable tasks). “ An example of this could be the massive online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. It utilizes gamification principles to entice users to curate and publish regular content while holding the community (and its content) responsible for accuracy and quality.

Google Crowdsource

Google’s Crowdsource was released for Android on the Google Play store on August 29, 2016, and is also available on the web. It seeks to serve as an application to help improve the quality of Google services like Maps, translation, image transcription, and more. Unlike Mechanical Turk from Amazon, the app does not work to improve other third party services but solely focuses on helping Google improve its own services.

What does it do?

When it was launched in 2016, the Crowdsource Android application presented users with five different tasks namely, image transcription, handwriting recognition, translation, translation validation, and map translation validation. The most recent version of the app includes 2 new tasks in addition to the original five tasks which are sentiment evaluation and landmarks.

Upon installation, users have to select the languages they are fluent in after which the app then shows five different panels relating to Google tools that you can contribute to. These are image transcription, handwriting recognition, translation, translation validation, and map translation validation. 

When a user chooses a service task to contribute to, the task requires the user to help in a different way. In the case of transcription of images, for example, the user has to type the correct name found in an image. In the tasks related to handwriting recognition, the user has to transcribe the on-screen text. Such tasks are therefore invariably aimed at solving tasks that Google’s famed algorithms can’t and need ‘real’ human interventions. An April 2018 interview in Wired stated that Google's machine learning algorithms work best in the United States and Western Europe, but are less effective in less prosperous countries. In this interview Anurag Batra, a product manager at Google who leads the Crowdsource team, shared Google's motivations behind the Crowdsource app, stating that Google has "very sparse training data set from parts of the world that are not the United States and Western Europe,”

The Gamification Angle

Google Crowdsource employs the typical motivational rewards that include points, levels and badges as users contribute their knowledge and expertise across various tasks. The achievements section of the app shows the progress made by the user and indicates the number of points required to move on to each level. Each level provides different types of feedback and unlocks several in app features. 

 One aspect of this platform that is quite evident is the fact that Google has not employed any extrinsic motivations like financial incentives or credits that could be used on the Play Store. Instead, they have opted to seek the kind nature of users to help make the internet a better place for the larger community by seeking to harness the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ in many ways. In many ways the angle of ‘altruism’ that Google Crowdsource has tried to invoke is reminiscent of many game design features where users help each other to complete tasks and achieve objectives to become successful.  Interestingly there is another app from Google called, Google Opinion Rewards, which has a financial incentive for user feedback.  So it is fascinating to know that Google is seemingly looking to exploit both the game elements of reward based motivations and altruistic motivations to enhance their products and services.

Dr. Manu Melwin Joy, Assistant Professor, School of Management Studies, CUSAT and Sebastian Panattil, Research Scholar, School of Management Studies, CUSAT.