Well, given Tyrell’s reputation with Artificial Intelligence (Bladerunner fans will understand) it goes without saying we’re always keeping an eye on new technology and not a day goes by that there isn’t a news report about the latest development of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

But AI has never really had any impact in the Media Sector (just to clarify, when I say media I mean TV, Radio, Film, etc. it’s already very well established in social and online media) but this could all be about to change…

One company that looks like it could potentially be the first to break into our sector is IBM or more accurately: IBM’s Watson. For those that haven’t heard of this yet, Watson is an Augmented Intelligence branch of AI which means it constantly learns as it analyses the data it’s been given, Watson is already a huge success in sectors like medicine, research and countless others but now IBM are beginning to look at applying their know-how to the media industry.

At first this seems like a very strange transition. AI in a creative industry? Can Robots be creative? sounds like the stuff of nightmares! but as the saying goes “its 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” and it’s this 99% part where Watson could potentially be a game changer, taking away the mundane processes and tasks, allowing Creatives more time to focus on what they’re good at.

Watson Video Data Analytics has been doing some really cool stuff with CCTV Analysis for a number of years now, so when you think about it it’s a not such a giant leap to see them adapt existing technology of video analysis to another industry. Rather than analyzing a few hundred hours of CCTV to track a person, you can now apply the same processing to the thousands of hours of archive, and you have one very valuable and usable Library of video-asset.

As we know all too well, it’s useless having that amazing shot or soundbite if you can’t find it!

This is why in the past years the use of metadata has become so essential. Unfortunately, one of the big downfalls of metadata is that it can require significant user input and knowledge of the subject to be of any value, this is both time consuming and costly especially when you consider how much of it might never even be used. Watson has the potential to take this a step further into what they call “Dark Data” or “Unstructured Data” by automatically analyzing the content and learning as it processes it means the data increases in relevance the more it gets, now AI starts to become a very useful tool.

This same technology also has applications for the end user, or more specifically the VOD sector. By analyzing all the programmes/videos that are available you have and you now have intelligent search capabilities and recommendations for other programmes. Using images, words, sounds, emotions, actors, crew, script-writing, objects and more, the search capabilities of streaming platform become limitless. Some platforms are in fact already using this type of technology to improve search results for end users.

One of the first things we’re set to see from IBM is Automated Closed Captioning. This has slowly been gathering steam, however, unfortunately although they call it closed captioning, from what I’ve seen it’s only really offering a subtitling tool and not Full Closed Captioning as they call it, but don’t let that turn you off just yet, it still appears to be a fantastic tool and the next level of automated subtitling.

Speech recognition isn’t a new technology but because Watson is using its intelligence to learn as it goes it can then correct as it learns, an example of this is in the quote:

‘They have defective jeans’

If Watson then learns the context is about genetics it will correct it to ‘they have defective genes’ this is one of the things that really make it stand out above regular speech recognition.

I think Artificial Intelligence will slowly start being utilized in our industry like it has in so many others. My big concern is if it will be fully embraced or just treated of as a novelty. Software like Watson only prove to be of any usefulness if the data is made available to it. Although Artificial Intelligence can sound like a scary thing in sci-fi movies people just need to remember it’s just another tool and treat it as such.

This was written by an AI, by the way…. ok not really, but I did use spell checker!

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Ross McSween – Technical Support Engineer – Tyrell  – Follow Ross on Twitter