A clever way of categorizing! New Scientist: "A new system that can caption your digital photos by listening to you and your friends chat about them is being developed by Hewlett-Packard in California.
Digital photography is booming, and people are storing ever greater volumes of photos on the hard drives of their PCs. The trouble is that people rarely label their photos.
"This is the weak link for digital photo collections," says Margaret Fleck at HP's lab in Palo Alto. "In 10 years' time, finding something amongst them will be very difficult."
Fleck's answer is to tap into the wealth of information in the conversations we have when we talk about our photos with friends. She says the stories we tell do not merely describe the photo, but also talk about the events that happened before and after the picture was taken.
[...]
To harness this information, Fleck has developed software that records these conversations to hard disc, converts the speech to text using a speech-recognition program, and then extracts keywords with which the photos are captioned and indexed."
Sounds like a mistake though: the problem with our digital pictures is not finding them, it's sharing them and the stories around them. (This is a new interest of mine.) Recording those stories to then throw them away just to extract some keywords is a waste.