Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsnuh | Hacker News Reader

I 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.

View on HN

Around 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.

IIRC it was called Jupiter? I remember using it in 2006.

Nifty little tool. Felt like the future.

Yup, that's the one. It closed down eventually but I had the number memorized so I could show it off to people.

At that time, I wonder if there was any technology actually identifiying the song, or if it was a big mechanical turk sort of operation.

Pretty sure they had the algorithm first.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk service launched in 2005.

The 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.

The concept of the "Mechanical Turk" has been around for over 200 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk

It'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.

Ehh, 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.

The term "mechanical turk" has been used to describe "fake AI" since before Amazon Mechanical Turk was released.

https://youtu.be/xm4mDO4XGIE

It'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

Now imagine you have a magnitude better signal fidelity and 10e8 times the storage and processing power)

According 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

Lol 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.

I remember using Shazam back in... 2008 on my whatever Nokia phone I had back then. It was pretty good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com