This week Google rolled out a new Youtube feature called speech-to-text recognition. As implied, the big G's supercomputers "listen" to each video and then create meta-data based on what it presumes to have heard. Places in the video where the keyword are found are highlighted yellow in the video slider, and if you hover over one of these markers, the text pops up in context.
While the project is in the testing phase, they're only applying the technology to political videos. They're calling it an ideal way to find out what a particular candidate had to say about a particular subject, but its also just as handy that the political videos are light on background noise - and politicians enunciate.
Here is the funny part: It's not perfect. I was trying to see if any "funny" words came up, and when I searched "penis", I got three results. One of these is a video of Mike Gravel speaking at Johns Hopkins university, and Google quotes him as opening the speech saying, "uh my knees I've got a picture of penises they're a part of plans ..." Another is Tom Harkin's declaration that "we spend penis to keep it healthy and well".
I find this extremely amusing.
Find some more out of context words. Go here if you don't have a Google homepage, or want to view the widget in a full page:
http://speech.clients.google.com/elections2008videosearch/gadget
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