If you are on the internet it's very likely you have used a search engine. Search engines currently mainly work to search trough text, but wouldn't it be wonderfull if you could e.g search a quote in the latest Star Wars movie to e.g who said it in what context?
The company Fast Talk has found a way to do this. Their software converts speech to the basic units of speech; "phonemes". Then if you are looking for a word, the software converts the word to phonemes and returns the time when the word occured in an audio/movie file.
The Fast-Talk engine can work with multiple audio formats, using pluggable "media accessors" to encapsulate them. The technology demo supports only WAV files, which it indexes to create PAT (phonetic audio track) indexes. If you want to search video, Fast-Talk recommends using VirtualDub, an open-source program, to extract the audio track as a WAV file. You can use Fast-Talk's demo to index pre-existing WAV files or, as I did, to index a WAV file while recording. This near-real-time indexing meant I was able to begin searching the index as soon as the 45-minute conversation ended. That was true because Fast-Talk's phonetic technology is orders of magnitude faster than the conventional alternative: speech-to-text translation followed by text indexing. |
Of course the possibilities with this kind of software is endless. Read the entire story on Infoworld.com here.
Source: Infoworld.com
