Facial Expressions As Part of Search Rankings? Kinect Could Do It
During the Microsoft keynote Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, CEO Steve Balmer noted “everyone who is enjoying Kinect knows that today it listens to your voice, and tracks your body, but what about your facial expressions? As you can see, now Kinect can track features like your smile, your laugh, and even the raise of your eyebrows,” the Huffington Post reported.
If they have the data and a user does a web search why can’t they add that to the ranking factor? Now that would take behavioral targeting to a new level.
Interestingly, Balmer thanked the billion customers they have – making sure the number was heard – 1 in 6 people on the planet use a Microsoft product!
Bing was mentioned more as an add on to the Microsoft phones then the possibility of what this new Kinect feature applied to actions to search or for that matter any advertising or website content. One has to wonder when the advertisers will start asking for their ‘connect’.
Liz Sloan – part of the Windows Phone team – joined the conversation and added “In addition to making search easy, we also worked to organize the stuff that you care about and a way that you can get to it that actually makes sense, which brings me to point No. 5, hubs. On other phones, your information, like games and apps and music are all a little bit disorganized, and live in separate silos. On our phone, we have what we call hubs. An example of this is the Office hub. Here in my Office hub, I can do all sorts of things. I can work on documents with colleagues and post them up to SharePoint. I can do a bit of financial modeling in Excel, and I can also keep all of my notes in OneNote.”
She almost sounds like search is a lesser thought when mentioning “stuff that you care about” right after saying Microsoft made search easy. But it could be read in a few ways…
It would be nice to hear more about Bing but given it is a electronics show I will let them getaway with it this time. But getting facial expressions tied to conversion tracking is one I will keep mentioning.