Google is now indexing the spoken word

While Google has repeatedly invested big in dubious technology, their shotgun approach has also produced a number of real advances. A new system that indexes spoken words within audio content could be another big game changer. While it’s currently being applied to YouTube in its limited beta, the possibilities for its use are endless. For example, indexing podcasts by thier actual content comes to mind.

Google, the current king of the Internet and all-around innovator, has announced a new technology called Audio Indexing–actually it’s called GAudi, which sounds more like a car than a web service.

Either way, it’s one of the slickest things I’ve heard of in months.

GAudi will catalog every word uttered in a YouTube video and add it to a searchable archive.  Translation:  you will soon be able to search videos by keywords used within the video.

For now, the product is still in Beta (limited testing mode), and will only be indexing YouTube videos related to the current political races.  So you can search for a soundbite you read about in a news article–maybe something Obama or McCain said–and then use GAudi to search for video of the speech on YouTube. (Keystone Blog)

Since we’re about to get spoken word content as we want it, perhaps being able to hum a few bars of a tune your are trying to find can’t be that far off (that’s a hint for Google).