LG has announced a new brand, ThinQ, which is an umbrella for all its 2018 home appliances, consumer electronics, and services that use artifical intelligence. Yes, this means your TV is going to start learning from your actions.
LG says ThinQ products will "have the ability to employ deep learning and communicate with one another, utilising a variety of AI technologies from other partners as well as LG’s own AI technology, DeepThinQ".
What does this mean? Well, we don't know yet. LG has "no further information to provide at this stage", and so we can only speculate on what deep learning will be able to provide for the customer.
So, let's speculate. For a start, greater artificial intelligence in televisions could result in better programming for people with impairments.
A project by Google’s DeepMind and the University of Oxford created a lip-reading system that could provide subtitles for complex sentences, which "vastly outperformed a professional lip-reader who attempted to decipher 200 randomly selected clips from the data set", according to New Scientist.
On the more commercial side, research is already going on into creating televisions that can scan objects on the screen and provide retail links, while Comcast in the USA is using natural language processing, image recognition, video analysis and other technologies to describe and understand what’s happening on the screen.
This means your TV might be able to guess what program you're thinking of when you forget its name, or quickly pull up highlights of a particular TV show - at least according to a blog from NVIDIA.
Since some of LG's white goods (washing machines and dryers, refrigerators, ovens, dishwashers, and vacuums) include Google Assistant, it's likely your TV will be able to share data with the tech giant to help direct your searches and show you more accurate adverts.
And should the company decide to integrate Amazon's Alexa (as Toshiba has), which we find in the Amazon Echo, it's entirely possible your next Amazon advert could be the same as the one on your television or, futuristically, items within your favourite show or movie.
We're probably a few years from that level of specification, but it could happen sooner than you think. Look to the future now, it's only just begun...
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