What did they really say?

There is an awful lot of political chatter in both Canada and the US at the moment. An interesting tool being developed in the Google labs allows you to stay on top of all this chatter. It’s called the Google Audio Indexing (GAudi) technology. Arnaud Sahuguet describes it in a post entitled Straight from the horse’s mouth.

You can now search for and watch political videos right from the Google News US election page.

Just enter the topic you’re interested in, or the sequence of words you want to find, and we’ll search candidates’ YouTube channels to return a set of relevant videos. You can filter the results by channel (all candidates, McCain’s campaign, Obama’s campaign or the presidential debates). When we return a result, we use yellow markers to indicate the exact moments the words you’re looking for are uttered. Just hover over the marker to read the transcript of a short audio snippet or click on it to jump to the right moment inside the video.

It is an interesting example of the power of speech technology. We can expect to hear more and more such applications in the very near future.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Technorati Tags: ,

Recorded Sound Collections Even Older Than We Thought

 
Move over Thomas Edison

Since the Mobile Web is likely to increasingly use sound technology, it is perhaps fitting to note that sound technology is even older than we had thought. As the New York Times describes, the oldest known recording will be presented on 28 March at a conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in California.

It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable ? converted from squiggles on paper to sound ? by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

?This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,? said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio.

Scott?s 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder. That recording until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back. The phonautograph inventor, ?douard-L?on Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.

One can also remark on the pace at which technology advanced in the mid-19th century. What used to take decades then is measured on a time scale of years in the 21st century.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Search the Internet for other related articles.
Loading