Google Starts Indexing Audio Content

September 19th, 2008

With the manifold increase that audio and video have recently gained on the Internet, it is becoming extremely difficult for users to find exactly whatever it is that they are looking for. In order to make the task simpler, Google has launched a speech recognition tool that enables searching within audio and video files.

A similar tool was available earlier on iGoogle. The new service, called GAudi, is presently in beta and can be accessed within Google Labs.

http://labs.google.com/gaudi

Google Audio Indexing works in conjunction with YouTube. The tool will catalog all the words that are spoken in a particular audio or video clip. This data will then be entered into a database, which users can then search for the audio or video content they require, in much the same manner as they use search engines for text based material. GAudi will provide a whole list of results, based on the keyword entered.

To start with, GAudi will only index and catalogue politically-based audio and videos.
If a user is not interested in watching the whole video, after having located it through GAudi, it will be possible for to directly reach the particular portion that is of interest, by clicking on the play buttons alongside the particular search result that is of interest.

So far Google has not provided any information regarding their future plans for GAudi. That has not stopped some users from conjuring up innovative methods to use the tool,as can be seen below: