Google keeps on innovating, and this one could be huge.

Google has announced that it has begun indexing audio, turning speech into text and making it searchable. No longer will we have to trust metadata and titles to find audio that we’re looking for. Google uses its voice recognition technology to create transcripts, and even points us to the point in the video where the words we are looking for are uttered.

Right now, the service, dubbed “GAudi,” is only available for political videos on YouTube, but what could be more useful right now? I did a search myself for “lipstick,” and sure enough, the Barack Obama “lipstick on a pig” video came up. Also, for the record, former Republican candidate Tom Tancredo used the term last year, although there are some bugs in the Google’s system: on their transcript, he’s putting “lipstick on a big.”

There are other services out there that use similar technology to do voice recognition on the web, one example being at Spactor.com. A company in Germany, mediaclipping.de, does something similar for 80 TV and radio stations in Europe. EveryZing also does it with an SEO component.

But this is Google, and what they are offering is useful. I could see this being especially useful for bloggers that don’t have access to the resources the larger news organizations have for researching past speeches and comments by politicians. I’ve always marveled at how The Daily Show is able to dredge up old quotes and lines that come back to haunt politicians, and this may make it easier for bloggers to do the same.

It won’t hurt of SEO, either, if audio from your site is being converted into text content.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 5:00 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.