New AI Site Guesses Which Movie You're Thinking Of

You will never, ever forget a movie title again.
The technology that runs the Alexa is being used by a Finnish firm to ensure that you will never again have to mine Google in the hopes of finding an obscure movie title. Valossa has launched whatismymovie.com, part of what they're calling the "Val.ai initiative," a new "Deep Search" that can identify any movie from a thousand different qualities, including emotions, locations, and specific objects.
A search for "Ben Affleck broken glass" returned Gone Girl with no problem, while "Tom Cruise kills aliens" suggested Edge of Tomorrow; even the vague, "Benedict Cumberbatch blonde" gave a suggestion of The Fifth Estate, in which the actor portrayed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

According to a press release from Valossa, the algorithm "uses the most cutting-edge computer vision, machine learning and NLP (Natural Language Processing) to obtain this Deep Content Metadata from several modalities, including analyzing each video frame as well as automatic multilingual keyword extraction from existing metadata."
The company also claims they can "easily identify conditional and chained voice commands (a feat not currently possible with Apple® Siri® and other voice-powered search assistants)."
Whether this will be the end of the world as we know it or just a boon to moms everywhere who want to watch "the thing with that guy, you know the one who did the thing," Valossa is certainly a harbinger of things to come.
Your Comment
16 Comments
It worked the first time and went wrong the second time. Still great.
March 7, 2016 at 1:57PM, Edited March 7, 1:57PM
Tried "guy believes he's an alien movie". No dice.
"Alien visits psychiatrist movie". Again no dice.
Used the first with Google, first hit: K-PAX (correct).
Not very impressed.
March 7, 2016 at 2:18PM
I tried "kid has nightmare about aliens" and it didn't find what I was looking for but typed it on google and got the answer as well :) It was "Invaders from Mars". I remember watching it on SyFy channel when I was young
Like you said, I'm also not impressed
March 7, 2016 at 4:57PM
Yeah, this is terrible. I typed, "Movie where kid goes backpacking." The results included Fat, Albert, A Walk Among the Tombstones, Bad Grandpa, Dope, Finding Forrester, Big Fish, Run All Night, Blank Check, This is 40, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and a bunch of other nonsense that isn't even remotely close tot he movie I was thinking of.
On Google, Into the Wild's IMDB page was the 4th result.
March 7, 2016 at 7:12PM, Edited March 7, 7:12PM
Interesting.
Really helpful, when it is completed.
March 7, 2016 at 4:00PM
I gave it four tests, failed all four times. Best it did was offer up one movie in question as the eighth choice behind other guesses that were spectacularly off.
March 7, 2016 at 4:10PM, Edited March 7, 4:10PM
I thought I'd toss it a softball searching "vampire documentary"
What We Do in Shadows wasn't even listed. I hope it gets better though. It's a cool idea.
March 7, 2016 at 4:50PM, Edited March 7, 4:50PM
Its a database.
Not AI.
March 7, 2016 at 6:17PM
I think the algorithm need to rate famous movies higher and make sure it understands enough about them. Just typing "rosebud" in Google would unambiguously identify Citizen Kane but this engine dumbly just suggests "The Rosebud Beach Hotel (1984)" and "Rosebud (1975)". Next test: "Charlie Sheen's dad go on a mission through the jungle to find a rogue colonel" again utterly fails to pick up even a suggestion of Apocalypse Now, while Google succeeds unambiguously and gives me a long list of Apocalypse Now reviews. If I put in Marlon Brando's name in the same sentence, then whatismymovie does finally give me Apocalypse Now, but only 4th ranking. Not impressed. So far whatismymovie seems to just look for famous actor names and suggests movies they've been in. That's not AI, that's something even Alta Vista could accomplish in the 90s. I'll stick to Google for now.
March 7, 2016 at 8:25PM, Edited March 7, 8:25PM
Yeah it's not magic.
March 8, 2016 at 12:48AM
I wrote "inarritu", no results.
March 8, 2016 at 9:53AM
Not ready for prime time... needs more work particularly with the use of movie quotes that it got wrong (ie no matches) 3 times of 4... the time it was right the movie was at the bottom of the long list.
March 8, 2016 at 10:33AM, Edited March 8, 10:33AM
I tried "Best picture Oscar, Single Take" and nothing... seems hard to not get that one and yet Birdman didn't come up at all. Juno did though!
March 8, 2016 at 3:24PM, Edited March 8, 3:25PM
This is terrible! I tried "find me films with brad pitt and george clooney" and most of the movies I got are without these actors. I would rather use Google or IMDb advanced search.
March 8, 2016 at 7:47PM
I typed in *ss to *ss and Requiem for a Dream was the first choice so yeah I'd say this is pretty accurate
May 9, 2017 at 11:51AM
"Indian orphan becomes rich on TV game show" - Free Willy 2 among others came up before Slumdog...
October 25, 2018 at 9:00PM