AudioHyperlinking
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Daily Update for August 8, 2013
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
Apple seeks patent to control devices with audio 'hyperlinks'
Remember when Lady Gaga pinged smartphones and presumably alarmed dogs by transmitting inaudible, high-frequency audio at a concert with Sonic Notify tech? It turns out Apple's applying for a patent to do something similar, namely "audio hyperlinking" that can be contained within an audio stream. Cupertino's application says that such sound waves could be audible or outside the normal hearing range of 20Hz to 20KHz and "cause an effect in the user interface" of a receiving device. That could be useful during a podcast, for instance, to give users links to articles relevant to a discussion via sound waves alone. The application goes on to describe how such data could be encoded into an audio stream and read by the receiving device, and leaves wiggle room for a wide range of uses. Call us cynical, but we imagine that includes a way of sneaking in more ads.
Apple applies for patent on 'audio hyperlinking' system for enhanced podcasts
Patently Apple provided some insight into an Apple patent application published today by the US Patent & Trademark Office for "audio hyperlinking." These hyperlinks can be audible or inaudible, and can be played back on podcasts, TV shows or in-store speaker systems to send messages to apps on your iPhone. As Apple notes in the application, hyperlinking has been limited to textual documents like web pages, and this process provides a way to allow hyperlinking of non-textual (video / audio) materials as well. As an example of how this could be used, imagine watching a recording of TUAW TV Live and having inaudible cues from the recording link you to the product pages of items we're talking about on the show. A hyperlink in one audio stream can even link to another audio stream -- for example, a hyperlink in a podcast could link to an advertisement audio stream that doesn't need to be embedded in the actual podcast, then return to the podcast once it has completed playback. As always with patent applications, there's no guarantee that Apple will ever use this technology in any forthcoming product or service.
