MindMeld launches AI platform for TV and entertainment discovery

At INTX, MindMeld Launches AI Platform for TV and Entertainment Discovery that Trumps Apple TV and Amazon Echo

BOSTON — MindMeld, a leading conversational AI company, today unveiled MindMeld for TV, the first solution designed for pay-television and over-the-top content providers to empower effortless entertainment discovery and smart-home experiences through voice and conversational interfaces.

“TVs and set-top boxes have had speech recognition for the last four years, but many users dislike the experience that’s been notoriously brittle and not very smart,” said Tim Tuttle, CEO and founder of MindMeld. “With the launch of MindMeld for TV, it is now possible for cable companies and smart-home service providers to create transformative conversational experiences that will delight millions of subscribers.”

MindMeld for TV’s solution delivers human-like accuracy, featuring:

1. Advanced AI to understand a wide range of query facets for both video on demand (VOD) and live TV programming content including awards, themes, show times, sports teams, popularity, time periods, and more. Here are some examples:
   • “Show me Golden Globe winners from last year.”
   • “Can I see what’s on ESPN this evening?”
   • “Bring up all the show times for the Big Bang Theory.”
   • “When is the next Giants game?”
   • “Show me the most popular TV shows from the 90s.”
   • “How about some movies adapted by Clint Eastwood?”
2. Pre-integration with the industry’s most widely used TV metadata libraries, including Gracenote, which cover more than six million movies and TV shows. This feature helps customers to quickly and easily get their intelligent conversational interfaces up and running almost immediately out-of-the-box. Built-in smart home language models that enable users to conversationally interact with their smart-home and IoT devices, including programmable thermostats, smart door locks, connected lights, and weather forecast services.
3. Client SDKs to support conversational experiences on a range of connected home devices including the Amazon Echo, smart TVs, and smart set-top boxes.

MindMeld for TV leverages state-of-the-art NLP technology known as “broad-vocabulary” language understanding and question answering. It’s the first conversational entertainment discovery solution to use this innovative technology, which combines large-scale machine learning with a proprietary semantic knowledge base to accurately understand millions of possible queries.

“We have seen a massive shift towards intuitive voice commands,” said Jack Leeney, US Head of Investing at Telefonica Ventures, a strategic investor in MindMeld. “Users now expect that all connected home devices will have conversational interfaces. MindMeld is well positioned to fundamentally change forever the way that companies engage with their end-users.”

Ankur Prakash, VP of Liberty Global Ventures, another strategic investor of MindMeld, said, “Voice interface is becoming a critical part of content discovery and user interface. Through our investment relationship with MindMeld, we are exploring how the cable industry can leverage conversational AI to create an intuitive and robust experience that takes content discovery to the next level.”

Pricing and Availability

MindMeld for TV is available today as an enterprise-grade, on-premise solution as well as a cloud-based offering. MindMeld provides both the advanced technology and expertise to transform any company’s proprietary data into an advanced AI platform to power next-generation conversational interfaces.