Samsung See’N'Search Automates TV Surfing

By interpreting closed captioning data, Samsung's technology can automatically pull up Web content relevant to a TV show without a mouse or keyboard.

Now that TV and the Internet are finally getting all cozy thanks to HTPCs, Web-enabled TVs, and streaming media boxes, Samsung is trying to help consumers take the next step in combining the two, by using TV programming to help round up relevant Web content. The company’s See’N’Search technology automatically scans TV programming for keywords and generates links that are accessible just by jumping to a different menu with the remote – no keyboard and mouse required.

The system harvests its information from channel guide information and closed-captioning metadata, then uses natural language technologies to sift the relevant words from the irrelevant ones and determine what a program is about. Consumers can pull up the automatically generated links on their TVs without any input of their own, and there are even options for zapping the data to other Wi-Fi connected devices rather than browsing it on the big screen.

“See’N’Search technology will revolutionize how consumers will see and use the Internet in the living room in the next few years” said Alan Messer, director of connected consumer technologies at Samsung’s U.S. research and development labs. “By greatly minimizing the need to manually search for related content and special interactive content authoring, this technology enables consumers to directly watch or surf Internet content that is relevant to them.”

Samsung gave no word on when this experimental technology would actually become available to the public.