undefined | Better HN

0 pointsams61108y ago0 comments

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.

0 comments

ungzd8y ago

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

revelation8y ago

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)

dsnuh8y ago

Pretty sure they had the algorithm first.

rapind8y ago

https://youtu.be/xm4mDO4XGIE

guelo8y ago

Amazon's Mechanical Turk service launched in 2005.

toomanybeersies8y ago

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

lstyls8y ago

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.

2 more replies

coldtea8y ago

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.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse