Who doesn't remember the opening scene of the classic Terminator 2? Over the years, Arnold Schwarzenegger's entry into the biker bar has been the subject of endless parodies, tributes and references. That "I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle" were the first words of a character who would eventually become a cultural icon of the 90s.
However, it is not the fight, the gestures or the vocabulary of the robot that best gives the viewer the scarce humanity of the protagonist: it is his way of understanding reality.
During several shots of this scene, we see reality as the terminator is seeing it: a plane dyed in thermal red, binary and full of details. Its interface allows you to analyze and evaluate in depth everything you look at at a glance: signs, vehicles, substances, sounds, and people, assisting you in making quick and effective decisions in finding the three things you need to continue your mission. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have such a smart tool in our daily work?
It is estimated that a scientist spends approximately 60% of his time selecting and organizing data, and another 15% obtaining it. That is, they spend the vast majority of their time on a repetitive, inefficient and error-prone task. Something similar happens if we move to the Broadcast & Media sector, where catalogers, editors and many other profiles that work side by side with content management systems (MAM) on a daily basis are often stuck in classification tasks that are rarely efficient. The main difference is that, as James Cameron prophesied to some extent, AI technology can help these professionals manage much more content with the same hands.
For some time, VSNExplorer MAM, VSN's content management platform, integrates different Artificial Intelligence and AI engines, such as IBM Watson, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, AWS and EtiqMedia to obtain automatic metadata of the contents. This technology is not limited to the usual characteristics of the file itself (such as format, duration or date of creation), but goes much further, being also able to recognize elements of the images that the system ingests and stores: people, objects, logos and texts – thanks to OCR technology that also enables transcription functionalities (speech-to-text) and translation of them.
The power of Artificial Intelligence does not end here: it is also able to recognize audio elements, such as voices and music, technologies that many will be familiar with by its application to protect copyright on some of the most popular video platforms, such as YouTube or Twitch.
Detailed media analysis for professionals
But if there are AI functionalities integrated in VSNExplorer MAM that we can qualify without hesitation as futuristic, these are the dynamic recognition of actions that combines sound and image analysis to correlate verbs, mentions and terms and recognize the emotions shown (anger, joy, sadness, fear ...) and that, together with the rest of the data collected, result in media assets analyzed in detail that will not only save a lot of time to its users, but they will undoubtedly assist their companies in their main mission, whether it is to create the content that their audiences want to see (linear and non-linear channels), locate a crucial media segment (security companies and public organizations), bring to light content of great historical value (documentalists) or choose the best segments and most impactful images for a video edition (informative programs and sports).
Best of all? The potential of AI integrated into VSNExplorer MAM does not end here. If we have our own service of these characteristics in local, we can adapt it to our specific needs, 'training' the system to recognize better and better the metadata that is of greater interest to us and automating processes in a progressively more efficient way, which makes it not only a powerful functionality, but also flexible, customizable and scalable. Of course, with tools like this it is not difficult to predict that what is proposed by fiction is getting closer, and that the future of content management is already intelligent.
Text published by the Spanish company VSN.
