BenBishop.me.uk

Well while not quite a public release, coincidentally I did get an invite to Riya arrive in my mail box today.  Much to my delight, after months of waiting, I finally get the chance to try out this new service. I have got to say that this is one of the new ‘Web 2.0′ services (for want of a much better expression) I have been most excited about, one service that could potentially be worthy of all the hype. Riya’s USP is in the facial and text recognition of photos and the ability to auto-tag what you upload.

Riya is a service that automatically recognizes people in photos and groups them. Add a tag to the person and all of the photos are tagged with that name. As your friends and family join Riya too, many of their pictures will automatically be tagged with your data (and their other friends’ data) too.

Riya, as they go to much length to stress is still very much in ’sobetaithurts’ mode and that’s a fair point. Many sites and services are very keen to jump on the ‘beta’ bandwagon that worked commercially so successfully with many of the Google products they miss the point of beta testing. Riya seem determined to state that its an unfinished product and that the feedback from this testing will result in improvements to the service as a whole. This adds value to the user in knowing that a service can greatly improve from first use and personally I look forward to seeing the benefits as the system and technology grows further. Facial recognition in video anyone?

After signing up and downloading the ‘uploader’, immediately the difference between Flickr’s services is apparent. The uploader appears intrinsic in beginning the facial recognition process, highlighting some of the faces of each photo as it uploads. Uploading can take a while though, with Riya stating that it takes 24 hours to upload 4000 photo’s, and it does require some system resources though it doesn’t appear to be too intensive on my setup.

Once uploaded, the process begins with manual training, adding names and email addresses (for further distinction between people of the same name) into your account and correlating these to the faces the system recognises. Once completed you can further refine the recognition process by highlighting faces that Riya has missed through direct training (though if the quality of images are good the number missed is low). Auto training takes place next by adding contacts from Yahoo Mail and Gmail to your address book or searching for users by name.

Though less headline grabbing, auto recognition is but a tool in the process, the most important part an online image storage service is the actual sharing of photos. While Riya’s interface is both clean and fresh, it’s a little way behind more established services like Flickr in terms of usability. I think many people while appreciating the technology, would struggle to utilise it properly at the moment. This is what a genuine beta is for though and I would expect a more intuitive and better documented UI to be available upon launch.

When the system becomes open and friends and family in the same social circles upload their photos, the real value and benefit of this service will become apparent. My obvious concerns with recognition between people with similar facial structure or skin tones like with family members thankfully doesn’t seem a big issue. Though I need to upload significantly more photos to be sure, I am pleased to say the accuracy of the face recognition technology appears surprisingly high and the hype looks well deserved. The future looks bright for Riya!