Nick Diakopoulos

Today I got the first cut of the Audio Puzzler Site online. Check it out and play it!

Audio Puzzler is a new kind of puzzle game based on unauthored content found online. The audio for the puzzles is taken from popular or interesting video clips from different genres such as news, documentary, or television. The audio puzzler is the type of game that harnesses people’s play to also provide valuable data which enriches the content played with. This is in the same vein as the ESPGame, the Listen Game, and PhotoPlay, which are all games which gather data in the process of game play. But while the data collected by these other games is useful for machine learning, the data collected with audio puzzler is immediately valuable as a transcription of the speech in the video. A similar effort (but in a much grander domain) is the Fold It project which seeks to harness playtime to solve protein folding problems. Much more detailed information about the evaluation of the technology will be forthcoming in a paper to be published at ACM Multimedia in October.