Google adds speech recognition to video search

Filed under: Internet, Video, Google, Search

Google adds speech recognition to video search

by Brad Linder Jul 15th 2008

Google is rolling out a speech recognition tool that adds a whole new dimension to video search. Previously, if you wanted to search for a YouTube video, you'd have to rely on the title and tags. Now you can actually search for spoken text in a video. Well, in selected videos only. Right now the speech recognition is only available in a handful of political videos.

You can check out the new feature by adding the Google Election Video Search Gadget to your iGoogle page. Or you can view the gadget as a standalone page. Just enter a search term and Google will locate videos where the word is uttered. Google will also add little yellow markers to the timeline letting you know where the word occurs.

Google uses speech recognition technology to automatically transcribe the text of these videos and add them to an index. Videos uploaded by politicians to their official YouTube channels are indexed within a few hours.

Google certainly isn't the first site to combine speech recognition with video search. Blinkx and EveryZing offer similar services. But Google is the 800 pound gorilla in both the search and online video worlds.

Tags: speech-recognition, video-search, youtube

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Todd said 1:36PM on 7-15-2008

From this blog posts description, it sounds cool. My immediate concern would be Google failed to make the text searchable in a semantic way, using open standards - effectively locking all that juicy data up in a silo.

Jacque Denise Yap said 10:18AM on 7-16-2008

well I'd say It's cool but Nothing will bring down prices today except a tipping point in perception. Getting off and doing something to housing market crisis. And now our U.S presidential candidates Obama and McCain are talking about it, the issues surrounding recent discussions on the housing market crisis has significant impact for all Americans. Presidential Candidates on housing Market

zephroelectro said 11:25AM on 7-16-2008

If they combine this feature with the option to translate the retrieved text from videos that are in other languages, I would use this heaps!

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