Yesterday Google announced that they were applying some of their speech transcription research to political videos on YouTube. The philosophy - pushing research into the market to see it’s value and how it’s used- is great. The implementation however is rather shallow. While searching for keywords within video may be valuable for some users, several other features (such as closed captioning) have been left out of the interface. Also, the feature has not been integrated into YouTube itself and only functions within the google gadget, which makes it less likely to be seen and used by many people.
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Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet and Ari Bezman, Product Managers
In this U.S. election year, what information could be more important than the candidates’ own words to describe their views, actions and platforms?
Our teams have been working to develop tools to make it easier for people to track election-related information. A few months back, YouTube encouraged everyone to participate in the discussion process through the CNN/YouTube debates, Google Checkout offered an easy and fast way for individuals to make contributions to political candidates, and the Geo team created maps and layers to inform voters during elections.
Today, the Google speech team (part of Google Research) is launching the Google Elections Video Search gadget, our modest contribution to the electoral process. With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube’s Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed. Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find. (…)
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.
