You May Soon Be Able to Tag and Search for Images Using Siri

Apple has filed a patent entitled, 'Voice-Based Image Tagging and Searching' which details a method for tagging or searching images using a voice-based digital assistant.

Apple notes that advances in camera technology, image processing and image storage technology have enabled humans to seamlessly interact with and "capture" their surroundings through digital photography. Moreover, recent advances in technology have led to a substantial increase in the use of hand-held devices for photo acquisition and digital photo storage. The growing volume of digital photographs has created a need for systematic cataloging and efficient organization of those photographs.

Tagging of photographs, for example, by associating with the photograph names of people or places, facilitates the ease of organizing and searching for photographs.


Apple says traditional approaches to photo-tagging can be non-intuitive, arduous, and time-consuming. Thus they propose voice-based photo-tagging, automatic photo-tagging, and voice-based photo searching.

According to the company, voice-based photo-tagging dramatically increases the speed and convenience of photo-tagging. For example, by combining speech recognition techniques with intelligent natural-language processing, a user could simply speak a description of what is in a photograph, such as "this is me at the beach," and the photo will be automatically tagged with the appropriate information. Also, because the natural-language processing is capable of inferring additional information, the tags may include additional information that the user did not explicitly say (such as the name of the person to which "me" refers), and which creates a more complete and useful tag.

Once a photograph is tagged other photographs that are similar may be automatically tagged with the same or similar information. When a user wishes to search among his photographs, he may simply speak a request: "show me photos of me at the beach." The speech-based input would be processed in order to find and retrieve relevant photographs based on previously associated tags.

More details in the full patent linked below...


Read More [via AI]