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Your phone can now be programmed to tell when you are bored. Researchers from Telefonica Research in Barcelona, Spain, say an algorithm they have developed could be used to push content to you when you're looking for something interesting to do. On the other hand, it could also be used to encourage you to put your phone down and go find some other way to be productive.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: Now a new twist on a challenge we posed earlier this year on All Tech - try, we said, just try to resist the urge to pull out your phone at the first sign of boredom. We did this with our friends at WNYC in the name of creativity. Research suggests that boredom fosters creativity, but the challenge was tough.MELISSA GRAY, BYLINE: Well, it didn't go that well, I guess, if the whole point of this was to get me to use my phone less.SERRI GRASLIE, BYLINE: I don't know if I'm actually doing any better than I was before.CORNISH: NPR's Melissa Gray and Serri Graslie after keeping track of their hours on screen. And as if it wasn't hard enough, now comes this news. Researchers wrote an algorithm to help a phone figure out when we are bored so it can offer things to do.MARTIN PIELOT: We start using the phone in a different way in certain moments of boredom.CORNISH: This is Martin Pielot of Telefonica Research in Barcelona.PIELOT: We basically can detect when people start killing time with the phone.CORNISH: For example, says Pielot's collegue Nuria Oliver, we might quickly browse a lot of apps.NURIA OLIVER: We go to Twitter, then we go to Facebook. Then we go to you know, some app, then we go to email because we are looking for something interesting.CORNISH: The phone can infer we are bored. It's correct about 83 percent of the time. One test was a BuzzFeed article. Researchers used the algorithm to push an alert with a link. People who seemed bored were more likely to click. You can imagine where some publishers might take this. The phone could become an even more enticing time waster. On the other hand, says Martin Pielot, this can also be used for good.PIELOT: If the phone would literally say, hey, do you really need to open Facebook for the third time now in a row? There's not going to be anything new.CORNISH: Maybe, say the folks at Telefonica Research, when the phone senses boredom, it could urge us to put it down and do something else.Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.
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