2022: The (amazing) year it was!

2022, what a year! Here at Google Crowdsource, we are thrilled to kick off 2023 to make Google products that you love, even better for your language, region and culture. We also took some time to reflect back on 2022, which was defined by the collective efforts of the Crowdsource community to help fulfill our mission. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at some highlights from the year that went by.

With the relaxation in restrictions and Covid curbs easing down in some parts of the world, the community hosted many offline meetups to reconnect with each other and finally meet in-person, talk about Crowdsource, contribute together and have fun. We also saw events being hosted at Google offices in various countries in the Sub-Saharan Africa, Indian subcontinent, Latin America and South-East Asia regions.

There were also initiatives led by the community to rally people together to contribute to Crowdsource with a shared vision. Some of these included community members coming together from various countries to celebrate local festivals and experience different cultures with the Crowdsource community. For instance, the Ramadan charity event in South-East Asia, which encouraged voluntary contributions to Crowdsource in the holy month of Ramadan. Similarly, we also saw community members coming together during the festival of Diwali to contribute images of various sweets and other local delicacies enjoyed during the festive season. Our community members from Sub-Saharan African countries came together to host contribution challenges and created a lot of buzz on social media with the mission to make Google products more diverse.

Crowdsource also launched new programs in 2022 to support various communities and languages from across the globe. We launched the third cohort of the Explore-ML program, an initiative to train and mentor select facilitators on technical, facilitation and communication skills by domain experts at Google. We trained 177 facilitators from 32 countries. We also engaged with students from universities across 22 countries as part of the Crowdsource Learning Community Program, a 3-month learning program for students to form a community, grow and learn together at their university.

Speaking of launches: The year also saw language enthusiasts and experts joining the Crowdsource movement. We launched diverse language communities that include Sanskrit, Bhojpuri, Odia, Santali, Punjabi (India), Kurdish Sorani (Iraq), Afar, Afaan Oromo, Amharic and Tigrinya (Sub-Saharan Africa).

Later in the year, we also launched Crowdsource v22. This release includes a number of new and impactful features, and we’ve already seen some exciting engagement from our users on these.
As part of v22, we launched the Image Description task as a way to gather natural-sounding speech and also launched Audio Donation on Web. Furthermore, we introduced a new search bar feature that allows users to search through various image categories within Image Label Verification (our most popular task).

As we take a moment to look back, reflect and celebrate all the moments that challenged, inspired and enabled us to grow, we are extremely excited to support our users to accomplish their shared vision with Crowdsource to make the Google products that they love even better!

Get Involved with Crowdsource by Google!

Join the growing Crowdsource community and make a positive difference to people’s lives across the globe. Spread the word to family and friends.

You can get started at our main Crowdsource website or download our Android app.

Your ideas and thoughts are always welcome; please feel free to write to us on Facebook or find us on Twitter using #GoogleCrowdsource. Please check back here often for the latest Crowdsource news.

How do you know if you are on the latest update?

Visit Crowdsource on Google Play. If you do not see the 'Update' button, you are good to go and are already on the latest version.