Alexandre Storelli is the man who thought out of the box and come up with an Adblocker for Podcasts and Radio. He gave the name – AdBlock Radio.
Alexandre doesn’t want the Radio listeners and Podcasts lovers to get annoyed by ads. “Ads exploit the weaknesses of many defenseless souls,” said Storelli. He added, “Ads dishonestly tempt people, steal their time and promise them a higher social status. Blocking them will be a relieving experience for many.”
Audio Ads draw on “Auditory Artifacts” and create Ads that one simply can’t ignore. These Ads are unreasonably louder and seems like there’s some “Sonic Arms Race”. Describing more about his project Storelli wrote, “Adblock Radio detects audio ads with machine-learning and Shazam-like techniques,”
Sharing his journey of creating this fantastic and innovative AdBlocker, Storelli said that he makes the most of speech recognition, machine learning, acoustic fingerprinting, and such techniques over a period of 3 years to make this project a success.
The new AdBlock Radio employs crowdsourced database of Ads and technique of “Acoustic fingerprinting” for converting the audio into an arranged algorithm of a number series. Storelli frankly mentions the fact that he has got this idea from technology used by Shazam to fetch the songs and lyrics. Although Storelli admits that the AdBlocker developed by him isn’t flawless and there are some escape clause like it identifies the hip-hip music incorrectly as an Ad. Plus, sometimes it also fails to recognize the ‘Native’ Ads where the podcast reader reads the Ads.
Unquestionably, Ads acts like an intruder, especially when it comes to saving and harvesting personal data from online activities. Businesses and many online earning models hang on Ads to gain some revenue and profits but that’s all good from their perspective. For a user, Ads are nothing but a brake in listening to Radio and Podcasts.
In the words of James Williams who’s the co-founder of Time Well Spent Movement, “the ultimate benefit of ad blockers are better informational environments that are fundamentally designed to be on our side, to respect our increasingly scarce attention, and to help us navigate under the stars of our own goals and values.”
To further support his action, Storelli quote the words of Jean Marc Jancovici who’s an French Energy Expert, “Climate change being one of the consequences of the modern mass consumption lifestyle, wishing a firm action against this process implies, for a part, to question the perpetual increase of the material consumption otherwise encouraged by ads.”
Storelli isn’t saying that Ads should be stopped but he suggested that the quality of Ads and content displayed in Ads can be changed. This neither affects the user experience nor the economy balanced through Ads. With this in mind, Storelli has come up with the idea of AdBlock Radio.
AdBlock Radio is an open-source platform with detailed commands on how to integrate it into your device and make use of it and force Radio stations and Podcasts services to enhance the quality of the Ads. AdBlocker, therefore, proves a good weapon to defeat the consumerism.
