But….I’m very pleased to see this kind of silly, out there stuff coming from Google. From InfoWeek:
Two Google research scientists want your computer to watch television with you so it can deliver personalized Internet content at the same time.
In a research paper presented last week at interactive television conference Euro ITV in Athens, Greece, Google researchers Michele Covell and Shumeet Baluja propose using ambient-audio identification technology to capture TV sound with a laptop PC to identify the show that is the source of the sound and to use that information to immediately return personalized Internet content to the PC.
What I find strange is that, well, this solves a problem I’m guessing we won’t have in about ten years, or sooner. The TV is just going to be another web application soon, and the device will be on the IP network anyway.
Let google know what I’m watching on TV?
Can you say “further loss of privacy”?
Is this just a very clever pitch?
At its very core its audio recognition, yes. Thus any form of audio could be matched (music tracks etc.)
In the UK there is a free service called shazam where you can use your mobile to send an audio track to a digital audio engine, and it sends you a text message back with the artist & track details.
8 years later and now we have apps like shazam which do the same task as this paper from google – listening to tv content and providing more content from the show like the ost and actor info