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>> “Shazam, the 18-year-old company...” Fact that Shazam is 18-years-old made me curious, and found the following on Wikipedia: >> “Initially, in 2002, the se
by wonderous 9y ago
>> “Shazam, the 18-year-old company...”
Fact that Shazam is 18-years-old made me curious, and found the following on Wikipedia:
>> “Initially, in 2002, the service was launched only in the UK and was known as "2580", as the number was the shortcode that customers dialled from their mobile phone to get music recognised. The phone would automatically hang up after 30 seconds. A result was then sent to the user in the form of a text message containing the song title and artist name.”
SOURCE:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(company)
- dsnuh 9y agoI remember the first time I Shazamed a song. It was during the flip phone era and it was honestly the most magical thing to me at time. I had always wanted something like this, and here it was at my fingertips.
- madeofpalk 9y agoI remember using Shazam back in... 2008 on my whatever Nokia phone I had back then. It was pretty good.
- ams6110 9y agoAt that time, I wonder if there was any technology actually identifiying the song, or if it was a big mechanical turk sort of operation.
- dsnuh 9y agoPretty sure they had the algorithm first.
- guelo 9y agoAmazon's Mechanical Turk service launched in 2005.
- coldtea 9y agoThe notion of a "mechanical turk" however, and of operations putting a facade on humans doing the work -- to which the parent alluded to ("a big mechanical turk sort of operation") and not specifically Amazon's variety , has been known and used for centuries.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoThe concept of the "Mechanical Turk" has been around for over 200 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
- lstyls 9y agoIt's pretty obvious what GP meant. The concept of crowd-sourcing small chunks of work as a service is not the same thing as a hoax which involved a single person masquerading as an automaton. Amazon chose a clever name for its service that is memorable and references humans fronted by machines. Asserting otherwise is an example of the etymological fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy.
- Retric 9y agoEhh, I have seen references to using a person instead of an algorithm before Amazon released their service. Basically, if your automating human dexterity it's robotics, if your automating the brain it's AI. Sorting vegetables being a useful early example where humans could be thought of as a replaceable black box if you can break down what they are specifically doing. Thus Machine vision and classification where two common tasks because you need to play any game not simply replay a specific one.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoThe term "mechanical turk" has been used to describe "fake AI" since before Amazon Mechanical Turk was released.
- rapind 9y agohttps://youtu.be/xm4mDO4XGIE https://youtu.be/xm4mDO4XGIE
- revelation 9y agoIt's just an easier form of speech recognition. That was plenty advanced in 2002. (Here is Shazam in a chip from 1988: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFth9K_IvwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFth9K_IvwA Now imagine you have a magnitude better signal fidelity and 10e8 times the storage and processing power)
- ungzd 9y agoAccording to Shazam Paper[1] (I can't find publication date), there were nothing fancy, just keypoints extraction on spectrogram. No deep learning with 100 layers or something like that which wouldn't be possible in 2000. [1] https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
- sp332 9y agoAround 2000, MIT had a number you could dial (toll-free) and ask a computer about the weather. It would keep track of where and when you were talking about during the conversation, so after asking "will it rain in Boston today" you could ask "how about Thursday" and then "how about Rochester, NY" and it would read you Thursday's forecast for Rochester. A very cool end-to-end demo of conversational tech.
- dsnuh 9y agoLol I just recalled that I applied for a job there in 2014 when they had a position open in San Diego. Gmail turned the email I sent with my resume. It always bummed me out that they never contacted me back.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoTIL People born in 2002 are 18 years old now.
- hrydgard 9y agoThe company was probably founded some time before the service launched...
- nicky0 9y agoThe company was founded in 1999.
- ateesdalejr 9y agoUm, that's partly wrong. I was born in the latter part of that year and I'm most definitely not 18.
- colejohnson66 9y agoYou missed the sarcasm
- ateesdalejr 9y agoMissing sarcasm qualifies for a downvote? Last I checked getting sarcasm in this medium is quite hard.
- colejohnson66 9y agoI didn't say it was right. I was just stating why you were being downvoted.
- wintercharm 9y agoThat's incredibly creative, getting around the limitations of flip phones.
- tmalsburg2 9y agoThat's how you see it today. But back in the day people probably thought, wow, look how creatively they are using the incredible capabilities of modern phones.
- psergeant 9y ago2580 was also the middle digits of the keypad, making it even easier. I made heavy use of the service back in the day. There was another service around the same time called Any Question Answered. This was before high quality internet on phones, and you could SMS them reasonably complicated questions and (at first) get good replies. Notable successes were their getting me ownership information for a pub, and telling me which local shops had an iPad in store. Service degraded significantly over time.