Podzinger: Audio and Video Search

As the use of audio and video continue to grow online, there's also been a growing need for online tools to search and use these media appropriately. One big problem has always been the inability to index most recordings -- forcing users to wade through an entire linear recording or to skip around hoping to chance across the particular snippet they're looking for.

Podzinger looks like a step in the right direction...

This search engine creates a text index of the audio data from audio and video files using speech-to-text technology to enable search within a podcast, not just within the metadata or text label. The program not only finds podcasts relevant to the search term, but also highlights the segment of the audio in which they occurred.

If you're using the right browser and media players, clicking on a key word in the results will make the audio begin to play just where you clicked. You can also back up, pause, forward, or download the entire podcast.

The speech-to-text translater isn't perfect -- making for some interesting results sometimes -- but this is definitely a promising advance for online media.