Future BBC iPlayer could tell who is in the room and notice when the children have gone to bed

The BBC is developing a new version of the iPlayer that harnesses artificial intelligence, with the potential for your television to 'spy' on the household and tell who is in a room.

As part of the corporation's quest to "personalise" its services, it has joined forces with Microsoft to build an experimental version of iPlayer.

The prototype uses voice recognition technology, allowing users to talk to their television. When a user says, 'Show me something funny,' it presents a list of comedy programmes. It responds to the question, 'What's going on in the world?' by automatically playing the BBC News channel.

Cyrus Saihan, the BBC's head of digital partnerships

Cyrus Saihan, the BBC's head of digital partnerships, distribution and business development, outlined his vision of the service's future when the technology has caught up.

"There could be interesting scenarios in a typical family setting," he said.

"Just by listening to the voices in the room, your TV could automatically detect when there are multiple people in the living room, and serve up a personalised mix of content relevant to all of you in the room.

"When your children leave the room to go to bed, BBC iPlayer might hear that the children are no longer there and then suggest a different selection of content for you and your partner. All of this personalisation could happen without anyone having to press a button, sign in and out or change user profiles."

Writing on the BBC's website, Saihan said viewers in the future could have conversations with their television set.

He said: "Whether watching a football match or a quiz show, most of us have at some point shouted at our TV, perhaps half expecting it to hear us, know who we are and respond to us – in the future, we might find that it does!

"If we look further into the future, when artificial intelligence and machine learning have advanced sufficiently, you could end up in a conversation with your TV about what’s available to watch now, whether you like the sound of it or not, whether there’s something coming up that you’re interested in, and what you like to watch when you’re in a certain mood."

The new service would be in the mould of Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri, both voice-controlled "digital assistants".

Fears have been raised that Alexa and Siri could be vulnerable to hackers. But Richard Benson of cyber security firm Xanadata said a voice-activated iPlayer would not present a risk.

"As long as it is well designed, it is not inherently less secure than using a password. And passwords come with their own problems - they have to be non-alpha-numeric, they can require changing every month. In the future we will see voice activation, face recognition or your location all used, rather than actively putting in a password."

A spokesman for the BBC said: "This was simply an internal experiment to help us better understand voice technologies in the home. No user data was collected and this isn’t a new service we’re planning on launching. User privacy is extremely important to us and we’ve a published a very clear privacy promise to our audiences."