Thursday, September 27, 2007

Conversation piece

Was it GMail that was going to put targetted advertising on emails by "reading" them for content and then serving relevant ads? Well, if that wasn't difficult enough, another company has come up with a way to link advertising to telephone calls made via the internet. It will have software "listen" to your call and then display ads relevant to your conversation. So, if you're talking about "dinner", a restaurant ad or review could pop up on the caller's computer screen. "Could" being the operative word since it seems that it's notoriously difficult for computers to recognise speech, for example someone writing about architect Harry Seidler, kept having Harry Spider come up on screen with the voice recognition software she was using. A test of Puddingmedia's beta software is reported on one news site as having had mixed success. Relevant ads appeared when the reporter talked about restaurants and computers, but the software was oddly insistent that he should seek a career as a social worker. But, as the chief executive of Puddingmedia advises, this could be seen as a feature rather than a bug ... "Sometimes crazy things pop up. It actually enriches the conversation, which is very cool."
Public trials of the software begin in the US soon.

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