SocialTV ChatBot

25/11/2022

SocialTV is a project granted by CDTI, Eurostars that allows users located remotely to meet virtually and watch the same program in real-time as if they were in the same room together. Through mobile and VR devices, users will have the option to interact socially (speaking, chatting, etc.). The system incorporates gamification and content recommendations as well.

The project is formed by three companies: Optiva Media, TVUP and Salin

• Optiva Media provides Metadata processing services for movie recommendation and gamification. To do this, its product, MediaStream, ingests all the metadata provided by TVUP.
• TVUP provides their product of end-to-end TV Tivify to be the backbone of the project to build SocialTV.
• Salin is developing the application, social capabilities, and user interactions in the chat room.

What is the purpose of the ChatBot?

The bot interacts with users, incentivize them to participate in the conversation and executes functions like gamification, quizzes, and group content recommendations.

Content recommendation for group members is one of the main uses of the ChatBot: when prompted, the bot asks the internal system for a list of recommended content based on all participant profiles. The recommender system powers gamification scenarios when participants in a room have not yet decided what content to watch.

Classic recommender systems are based in one way or another on Collaborative Filtering, which is OK for large systems but has sparsity problems in small deployments and lacks explainability. The recommenders in Social TV will be based on content and user profiling and matching between those two spaces:

• Content profiling: contents are characterized based on their associated tags as provided by MediaTag, Optiva Media’s tool for automatic tag assignment based on AI analysis of metadata. These are leveraged to create abstract content profiles that can be compared to gauge content similarity.
• User profiling: based on the ØIL (Empty Knowledge, Interest, Like) history of users. A profile for each user is generated considering their most representing metadata from the content (s)he’s watched. Matching users and contents consist of calculating their similarities based on the user profiles and the content metadata.
• Create a unique recommendation for group content based on each user’s recommendation

Other actionable features:

• Quizzes and trivials about movies they have watched to entertain the room.
• Karma points rewards: Users can earn karma points by engaging with the SocialTV system. Karma points can be gained from the number of videos watched, by commenting, rating, sharing, playing quizzes, etc. Karma points ate used to reward users with premium services, discounts… etc.

Collaboration opportunities

Optiva Media R&I is able to integrate the ChatBot in any system based on collaborative projects and proposals both at the European and national levels. We intend to separate the two main functions that the bot needs to provide. The first one is the conversational functions of the bot that would be implemented by your already-built system. The other function of the bot is to implement the recommendation services mentioned above.