Okko in Speech

ReadWriteWeb reports Tim O’Reilly addressed attendees at the San Francisco Web 2.0 Expo this week, talking about key technologies for the Web >2.0. Voice search (Google iPhone App), he claimed was a tipping point in terms “sensor based interfaces”.

While not the only vendor to provide voice search (i.e. Yahoo oneSearch powered by Vlingo) Google certainly seems ahead in the game in what appears to be a gradual unfolding of a broad voice strategy, such as Voice Search and recently rebranding a feature-enhanced GrandCentral as Google Voice. Future work on the voice front we can expect includes promotion of its own speech recognition capacities through Android, Google Gears bringing speech capacities to all browers, tighter integration of Gaudi (audio indexing) with other services and perhaps one day opening up voice services over APIs.

As I’ve previously pointed out, to Google voice is just another form of data, but what’s slowly beginning to emerge is a central role for speech and voice technologies to play in coming developments for the web and how we search and interface with it.

Google Labs opened GAudi this week to showcase its new audio indexing technology.

Google GAudi allows searching for keywords/phrases in the audio-stream of selected YouTube videos. Matches are represented as yellow slots on the playback slider. Top results appear as snippets of text from the audio surrounding the search term as well as information how many minutes into the video the term occurred.

The video material chosen to showcase GAudi is material concerning this year’s US presendential elections as “part of a broader effort around politics”, but also because of the high performance with such material and the relevance to testers and users.

Indexing does not appear to be complete, as using randomly chosen text fragments from showcased videos did not always result in a match. Google does say Gaudi is using its own speech recognition engine, perhaps the same employed by GOOG411, though most FAQs about technical details and how one could use GAudi for video are directed to email inquiries.

While GAudi is showcasing campaign material, it seems only a matter of time before audio indexing will be available for serving ad content on video.