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Nokia patents tagging photos by voice

By: , IntoMobile
Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 4:21 PM

Nokia has been granted a patent for the voice tagging of camera phone pictures. The patent details how Nokia might add a feature to create voice tags to make it easy to file images on your phone or on a PC.

The system would allow you to take a picture of a landmark or person and immediately tag it with a number of tags and the image would then be stored in a folder for each tag.

For example if you take a photo of a sunset over the sea. You could tag it with “sunset” and “sea” and the photo would exist in the two separate folders.

Source: Mad 4 Mobile Phones

I don’t get it …

Direct link to patent

You speak to a phone, it uses a speech to text engine, and then your photos are tagged by the words you uttered. How can you patent something as simple as that?

Is Nokia doing this for the royalty check when/if Motorola, Samsung, or Apple try to implement the same feature? What do I know about patent law? Absolutely nothing!

I suppose this is something to cheer Nokia on for but in all honesty patents have hurt this industry more then help it. Just look at the current legal battle Nokia is in right now with Qualcomm.

I’d be more interested in a competent replacement to text entry via the number keys. Living with the N93 as my main phone is hard, I’m definitely going to pop the SIM card back in to my E61 over the weekend for some QWERTY goodness.

UPDATE: On second thought there would be no need to use a speech to text engine since all the phone would have to do is match the sound bites of you saying "sunset." Makes you wonder tho … how are you going to look like taking a picture, then whispering sunset in to your phone, taking another picture, talking to your mobile, rinse and repeat.

All I know is organizing photos has been a problem since the jpg was first unleashed on to the net. Nokia isn’t going to solve it, nor is anyone else, but steps are being taken to make it some what easier.

I wonder who patented tagging your photos with GPS data? Smart man.

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About The Author

Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.

  • Viipottaja

    I am afraid there much more obscure, useless, harmful, and immoral, and definitely less justified, patents or attempts to patent going around: take for example attempts to patent the human genome or actual species in the nature..