Finding the words in the video

I am sure you have been there. Cruising through YouTube videos and you find a gem. One that you need to share and especially the best bit that made you laugh so hard you nearly wet yourself. Your friend pops round, you settle down in front of the screen and you need to find that scene. Your friend is not impressed with the start and you want to just need to show them the funny bit, but where is it? The part where he is talking about dog fouling…why cant you find it?

Well, Google sympathises with your pain. Not so much about the dog fouling scene that you need to find but surely the part where you can now search through videos using words that are spoken in it.

The Google Video Search gadget has been designed for a higher purpose than to assist you in finding the best bits of video clips. It is Google’s contribution to the elections that are taking place now in the states.

The technology uses voice recognition to take what is spoken in a video and convert it into text and then indexed enabling users to search through speeches (some which are easily over an hour in length) to find a point they missed, want to hear again or to share with a friend. Video’s from YouTube’s Political Channels are being used in the gadget.

Google does put a disclaimer on the software saying that it is not 100% accurate so users should anticipate a certain number of mondegreens a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said such as in the Jimi Hendrix classic “Purple Haze” many people report hearing “excuse me while I kiss this guy” when really the famous artist sings “kiss the sky”.

Although speech recognition software is still quite a ways away from the likes of Hal, there could be hope in the use of this new Google gadget by the search giant to crack the last few holdouts in the technology. However popular the new gadget proves, we are bound to expect a few choice mondegreens from it.