If you are like me, you probably have some interest in the 2008 US presidential election. In order to help you make your mind up in terms of who is the better candidate, you might have also been wondering about the position of the two presidential candidates on various issues. Well wonder no more, thanks to Google’s new audio indexing technology (Gaudi), you can search through exactly what the the candidates have said about various issues !
Google has tried to embed (and since taken off) this technology in various parts of YouTube, but I found the best place to test it out to be right from the Google Gaudi Labs Page.
For example, say you are interested in what Obama has said about “NASA”:
Google will find you all the clips where NASA was spoken by Obama (displayed on the left), you can then play the clips on the right hand side. If you click on the play button on the right hand side, Google will even take you directly to the section where NASA was spoken! It doesn”t get easier than this in terms of searching for what the candidates have said about a particular issue. At the moment you can also search through all the videos in the YouTube political channel to finds what any other politicians have said about certain issues, just click on “All Politicians”
Does it work ? Well the transcription is not perfect and the search sometimes find wrongly transcribed word, but it is certainly usable. I suspect the slight hit and miss nature of this technology is what’s holding Google back from general public consumption.
I blogged about Blinkx attempt in trying to index the spoken words, who certainly has a lead in this space of deep indexing of videos. Google is now well and truly venturing into this area, be it slowly and carefully as to not disappoint and damage its rock solid reputation in Search. There is no question that deep indexing of videos and transcription of spoke words has tremendous potential in unleashing the value of more unstructured contents.
BTW, you can also add this technology as a Google gadget at your iGoogle Page.
Check it out and let us know what you think !
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