Back in June Google announced the introduction of speech recognition technology to YouTube and just a few weeks later it is now fully integrated into the political section of YouTube called YouChoose.
Users can visit the YouChoose area and will notice a “What did the candidates say?” search box about half way down the page. Entering a relevant search term such as “guns”, “health” or “Iraq” will bring up a list of videos that have references to those terms. The playback bar will also have yellow boxes on it that you can mouse over bringing up a pop-up showing you relevant dialog contained in that section.
Google achieves this new search type by scanning the speech contained in a clip and indexing all of the words used. This data is then references when a user types a search term to select relevant videos and highlight the seconds the words are spoken in. Google also say the indexed version of a video can appear just a few hours after it is uploaded to the site.
At the moment speech recognition is limited to just the YouChoose political videos.
Read more at Beet.tv
Matthew’s Opinion
As the popularity of videos online continues to grow we need better ways of searching for content within them. Having tags selected by the people uploading the videos is great, but it would be nice to get more specific and this speech to text system seems to work well. Other companies are also attempting this with a notable provider being video search site blinkx.
One thing that needs to improve is the speed at which the indexing is done. Google are quoting a few hours for a video to be indexed and brought online. In the video above Google’s Steve Grove says they get 13 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. If all of that is to be indexed then something clearly needs to change either in the system used or how it selects what videos to index. One solution could be to make the indexing part of the upload process placing the workload on the user’s machine rather than Google’s servers. It would still have to be a faster process though.
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