Read about what the Internet Research & Future Services (IRFS) team in ±«Óãtv R&D have been up to in the latest two-week sprint (20th Feb - 3rd March) in our 239th weeknotes.
We've been improving the performance of Mango and Starfruit, our concept extraction systems. We've been learning from some users at ±«Óãtv Monitoring and generally deploying and stabilising things.
We're continuing our face recognition work, deciding on a test case of detecting UK politicians in news footage. Jana, Denise and Ben have been evaluating the speed and accuracy of different algorithms that are currently available. And we're close to releasing a new version of Kaldi that provides near-real-time speech-to-text.
Next up we're going to start investigating alternative approaches to speech-to-text and how best to combine some of our analysis algorithms into something greater.
Conversations
Andrew and Joanne (plus a writer from ±«Óãtv Childrens) have been developing scripts for two ideas around voice UIs for children. The first is a music-making machine and will be a working prototype built by Henry and Tom. The second will be a prototype that simulates the voice experience by using a script and a sound board. They're roping in Sacha to voice the ...
Meanwhile Nick has been working with ±«Óãtv Rewind to create a Flash Briefing for Alexa that plays "On this day" pieces of archive audio.
News
Barbara, Tim and Joanne have written up an evaluation of the recent Newsbeat Explains pilot; its performance, user tests and feedback from the journalists that wrote stories for it.
I'm re-starting some research into new article formats for news. This set some people off..."I hate all the 'Live' format stuff""I hate (even) more all the click-baity multi-page stuff""I hate the term 'Explainer'"...along with some general dislike for listicles, as well as Google AMP and its URLs. I didn't get many positive examples, so please send any things you've seen to .
Everything else
Libby and team are taking our work on future television interfaces to various places around the ±«Óãtv, next week it's the Blue Room in Salford.
There's been some training and development - Tim, Kristian and Chris are on an ongoing Digital Signal Processing course. Kristian and other R&D trainees visited the BVExpo and the ±«Óãtv Blue Room to see the latest in video production and consumer technology.
In her 10% time Libby did an experiment into . And Tim used his to learn more about tag-based clustering, react.js and his own interests by building he’d tagged.
Oh, after he helped ±«Óãtv Four find out if music can be analysed to identify a formula for chart success.