James Theophane and agency Clemenger BBDO have installed a generative speech recognition trending engine in the auditorium of Sydney’s TEDx conference.

When given a brief to create a film that would surprise and delight an audience of thought-leaders during the short breaks in between talks, Theophane and Clemenger BBDO decided to think outside the box and challenge the medium by coming up with Mimeisthai, the world’s first ever trending software to recognise speech.

Seeing the informal chats as an opportunity to access the core of the luminaries’ thoughts and ideas even further, and find out what’s really on their minds, hidden microphones were installed into the auditorium. The snippets of conversations are then fed into Mimeisthai and the trending topics are visualised on a screen in a one-off intermission.

In some ways redolent of the Listening Machine we recently wrote about in our feed, Mimeisthai is a wonderful hybrid of technology, social media and basic human curiosity.