Show HN: Teaching a $14 ESP32 to Detect and Auto-Mute TV Ads

[naveen_k]

Picked up a compact ESP32 recently and wanted to try using it to solve an annoyance of mine.

I used the ESP32's camera, a small classification model and Home Assistant to automate muting and unmuting the TV when an ad shows up when I'm watching Prime Video.

[matthewfelgate]

Ha, that's amazing.

I wonder what's a way to detect ADs just from audio. Maybe by volume?

[naveen_k]

Thanks!

For audio based detection, I would start with collecting a large corpus of normal shows vs ad segment audio dataset. I assume the amplitude (volume changes) and frequency distribution would be unique enough to distinguish between them.

Train a model using their Mel Spectrogram and deploy on-device.

Microphone -> ADC -> Preprocessing -> Spectrogram Generation -> Inference -> Mute/Unmute

Would be an interesting project.

[matthewfelgate]

I believe it's more than just an interesting project—it has the potential to be a commercial product.