Google sounds off about audio indexing

SEARCHING FOR YET another way to worm it’s way to net dominance, the great Google monster has come up with a way to search audio and video content for specific words and themes, or to put it formally, audio indexing.

Audio indexing, or GAudi as it’s being dubbed, is not exactly new, but was previously only on show on iGoogle. Now, however, the boffins in white coats have deemed the technology stable enough to be let out of its cage and onto its own Google Labs page.

The way it works is through basic speech recognition tech which combs through audio and video segments and makes words uttered searchable, just like text. Intelligence agencies have been using similar tech for years, with good results.

Searching for a word in a video will bring up a whole list of search results with hits for that particular word, along with a text snippet from the video where the word was mentioned to give the searcher an idea about the context. Google even takes it a step further by highlighting at which points in the video the keyword was mentioned.

This isn’t exactly child’s play though, and voice recognition still has some way to go before reaching a perfected state. But Google is impressing users by showing off GAudi’s potential in indexing US politico speeches, something which works particularly well because the sound is clear and background noise is minimal.

Hopefully it won’t be too long before the Google Gods improve on their de sign to the extent where the whole of YouTube and the Net beyond will be audio searchable. Sounds good to us, anyway. µ

L’Inq
Google Labs