Developer Made an Ad Blocker That Works On Podcasts and Radio

'Meet AdBlock Radio, an adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts.
Its creator, Alexandre Storelli, told Motherboard he hopes to help
companies "develop alternative business models for radio and podcast
lovers that do not want ads." "Ads exploit the weaknesses of many
defenseless souls," Storelli told Motherboard. "Ads dishonestly tempt
people, steal their time and promise them a higher social status.
Blocking them will be a relieving experience for many."

Most audio ads exploit "auditory artifacts" to produce an ad that
can't be ignored or tuned out because it feels louder than it actually
is -- this has gotten so bad that there has actually been a "sonic
arms race" where ads have been made increasingly louder over the
years. "Adblock Radio detects audio ads with machine-learning and
Shazam-like techniques," Storelli wrote about the project. He said
he's been working on it for more than three years and that it uses
techniques such as speech recognition, acoustic fingerprinting, and
machine learning to detect known ad formats. It uses a crowdsourced
database of ads and "acoustic fingerprinting," which converts audio
features into a series of numbers that can be combed by an algorithm.

Storelli has made Adblock Radio open-source and given detailed
instructions on how to build on it, integrate it into user devices,
and deploy it in a way that pressures radio stations (and podcasts) to
self-regulate the quality of their ads.'

-- source: https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/19/09/25/2056215

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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