Boxfish first launched on iOS last August, and the company’s co-founder and CEO Eoin Dowling told me during an interview this week that a lot of his team’s work since has been spent on perfecting the identification of topics. The new Boxfish Android app automatically displays two hashtags with key topics per channel, and these get automatically updated as news anchors switch to the next topic or as a show goes into commercial break.

These topics are being identified through cluster analysis, Dowling explained. That means Boxfish doesn’t query Wikipedia or any other dictionary source to make sense of conversations, but instead gathers meaning from the context of which words are used. That’s a necessity to make sense of TV in real time, explained Dowling: “News doesn’t exist in dictionaries yet.”

The new Android app lets users check out the current topics on any given show, search for topics across all channels and set alerts for their favorite shows. It also allows users to control their DirecTV and Google TV set-top boxes, making it possible to to tune into a channel as soon as you discover that a certain keyword has been mentioned. It’s a bit less useful without that remote control capability, but still an interesting toy to play around with, especially if you’re a news junkie like me.

However, Dowling made it clear during our conversation that the app is just a first step for Boxfish. The company also built out an API to give others access to its real-time data, and is already in conversations with cable providers, CE companies and others to give them access to this data.

TV makers could for example use Boxfish’s real-time data to make viewing suggestions that are much more fine-tuned than simple show-based recommendations. Care only about a certain sports team? Then how about getting alerts whenever it is a major topic, no matter whether it’s on SportsCenter or the evening news?

Likewise, DVRs could become much better at serving the things you really want to watch, for example by letting you jump right to a news segment you care about, as opposed to making you sit or fast forward through an entire show in search for those 45 seconds you want to watch.

“I just want to see people use this to build a better TV,” said Dowling.

Boxfish’s team of 10 is backed by Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture fund, which has invested a total of $5 million into the company.

Take a look a t a couple of screenshots of the app on my Nexus 7 below:

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Here is how it works: Boxfish takes the the closed captions from 3,600 cable and local broadcast stations all over the U.S. and indexes and analyses all this data in real time. The result is presented as a constantly updating stream of trends and topics – think Tweetdeck, but for live TV.

Boxfish presents updates from the world of sports, news, business and celebrity gossip by default as part of its live feed. It also surfaces trending topics, which at the time of writing included Paul Ryan, Medicare and Chad Johnson. Users can customize the app by adding their own favorite channels to take a quick glance at what’s being talked about on CNBC or ESPN at any given time. And the app can be synched with a TiVo or a DirecTV set-top box to help users change the channel every time they want to tune into a conversation. However, there’s no esy way to filter out channels that a subscriber doesn’t have access to.

Check out a few screenshots of the app, or continue reading below:

Boxfish co-founder and CEO Eoin Dowling told me during a Skype chat Monday that his team initially set out to build a kind of Google for TV shows, allowing users to search for content through captions. But once it started testing its technology with users, it realized that the search engine analogy was all wrong: Early testers weren’t interested in complicated searches. “They were using TV as a live stream,” said Dowling. In other words: Less like Google, and more like Twitter.

I’ve had a chance to play with Boxfish a little bit over the last couple of hours, and gotta say that the app is definitely intriguing. Yes, it can seem a little bit overwhelming, especially if you’re trying to catch up on popular topics.

But the basic idea behind it is very clever: Dowling and his co-founder Kevin Burkitt told me that only about 60 percent of your average TV viewing time is spent on shows and movies you don’t want to miss. The other 40 percent is about tuning in, trying to catch up on news and just randomly flipping through channels, looking for something new. That’s the 40 percent Boxfish is after. “TV does a terrible job giving you new content,” said Burkitt.

So what’s next for Boxfish? The duo told me that it has an iPhone app more or less ready, but wants to collect feedback from iPad users first before releasing it. It also plans to release apps for Android and even smart TV platforms, but eventually wants to give others access to its treasure trove of indexed captions through an API as well. “It’s really interesting data – and there is only so much we can do with it,” said Downling.

Boxfish was founded in 2010 in London, and the founders moved to the Bay Area in 2011. The company raised a $3 million Series A round, which was led by T-Venture, and the team currently consists of 10 people.

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