A REPORT IN the New Scientist gives us a glimpse into a utopian future in which your computer is able to listen to conversations and only bother to fill you in on the bits that you find interesting.

The article reckons that researchers were working on the system, which unlike Facebook would offer you a chance to skim through inane babble and chatter, and consolidate your 'noise' into just the facts.

Experts from Sheffield University and IBM are working together on the system called Catchup, which hopes to do something that other forms of automatic voice recognition software have failed to do. Which is stop people laughing at it.

"Catchup is able to identify the important words and phrases in an ASR transcript and edit out the unimportant ones. It does so by using the frequency with which a word appears as an indicator of its importance, having first ruled out a "stop list" of very common words. It leaves the text surrounding the important words in place to put them in context, and removes the rest" reports the New Scientist.

"In tests of Catchup, its developers reported that around 80 per cent of subjects were able to understand the summary, even when it was less than half the length of the original conversation. A similar proportion said that it gave them a better idea of what they had missed than they could glean by trying to infer it from the portion of the meeting they could attend."

Or, if you prefer, "Catchup is good. Innit." µ