The voice recognition website and its vulnerabilities

The other day I stumbled upon midomi, a website that’s based on a brilliant idea. You know the times when you know a song by it’s rhythm, but not by its name? The website allows you to search through tunes by humming a part of the song, or directly by typing its name. I’ve tried out midomi and, honestly, I found no replies that matched the song I was singing. Well, to be entirely honest, I have no singing voice whatsoever, so that must be the reason for my bad search. But the website has its vulnerabilities, which I’m going to point out next:

1. The human factor
As it is the case in every project that relies on people, this website is no exception, and is exposed to human error. I’ve encountered several renditions that were far from perfect. Songs that are interpreted awful, or that are interpreted good but the background noise is too loud that it will disrupt any search. Plus, I’ve found songs by Eminem sung by girls, songs by Madonna and Fergie sung by men, and so on.

2. The machine factor
As it is the case with mobile phones, where, in order to access a Voice Tag, you have to repeat yourself several times, this type of search isn’t a hundred percent perfect. Even if you have tried your best to make the song sound as close as possible to the real thing, chances are that, even if the right search is displayed, it might be behind a dozen other bad results.

3. The spam factor
This is a constant threat to every person that runs a website nowadays. YouTube has plenty of spam (may it be in its videos, or in the users’ mailboxes, as I’ve come to know when I received a couple these past few weeks), and it is a much larger company. I haven’t found any spam messages, but I’m sure that, as the website will gain in popularity, they will appear. I’ve also run a small “experiment”, I’ve recorded a piece of a song (with my bad voice and all), and submitted it. No moderation, it went directly into the archives, waiting to be found by the next person. With this in mind, it would be fairly easy for somebody to add a piece of recording that can be described as spam.

With this in mind, I think that midomi.com will spend some time in Beta, as they have plenty to work on.

Posted in Internet, Reviews by Andrei Maguleanu