Helios allows customers the freedom from the archaic bondage of textual tags to describe things like “melancholy”, “dramatic”, and other labels. Textual tags are not only labour intensive to manually generate, but even if generated automatically they have many serious problems.
Consider a thought experiment in another world. Imagine you were not searching for music, but instead were looking for a picture. You use a system that contains a catalogue of pictures. Each picture has been manually tagged by someone with a smell they recorded of the object in the picture. You can directly experience the smell when you click a button in the catalogue next to the picture. That is, one set of symbols (smells) is used to find objects in another set (pictures).
The people in that world figured out how to make their computers work with smells long before they figured out how to get them to understand pictures. Eventually they figure out the latter so that they can search for pictures with pictures.
Unfortunately the social inertia in that world still encouraged some people to search for pictures using smells because that’s what they’ve been accustomed to do for a really long time. Of course, they forgot that what they were really looking for was a picture and not a smell.
But there’s other problems with textual tags. Imagine you have a customer on the other side of the planet looking for a song in your catalogue. You’ve got the perfect song for them, but the keywords the customer uses aren’t appropriate.
Perhaps your tags are in English, but they speak something else. Or maybe they understand English, or you’ve managed to have your tags translated into a language they’re familiar with. There’s still a problem. Merely translating the semantics perfectly from one language to another, when possible, still doesn’t mean that they become equally useful. Consider your customer might have thought dramatic in their culture instead of melancholy – what the perfect song buried in your catalogue was tagged with.
In our experience, the customer almost always comes already with music samples in hand that describe the perfect tune to accompany their commercial, documentary, or other medium. Just use the music, save yourself the trouble, and make the sale in a fraction of the time.
