Killer New Audio Indexing Technology From Google

Google, the current king of the Internet and all-around innovator, has announced a new technology called Audio Indexing–actually it’s called GAudi, which sounds more like a car than a web service.

Either way, it’s one of the slickest things I’ve heard of in months.

GAudi will catalog every word uttered in a YouTube video and add it to a searchable archive.  Translation:  you will soon be able to search videos by keywords used within the video.

For now, the product is still in Beta (limited testing mode), and will only be indexing YouTube videos related to the current political races.  So you can search for a soundbite you read about in a news article–maybe something Obama or McCain said–and then use GAudi to search for video of the speech on YouTube.

That’s pretty mind-blowing to me.  Sure, there have been speech-transcription services for years that allow you to dictate text to your computer… but they are far from perfect, and had never been applied to video like this.  As video’s importance on the web increases, technology like GAudi makes finding the right video a heck of a lot easier–and if you’ve ever tried to search for a particular video on YouTube without knowing its title… you know how frustratingly hard it can be.

Imagine a future where your company creates and uploads videos to YouTube–maybe instructional, maybe humorous, maybe just advertisements–and you’ve used some good keyword selection in writing the spoken script for that video.  People who just surf around YouTube for videos related to their favorite topic will then have a much easier time finding your content than they currently do.

So now everyone in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry will be adding video content writing to their roster of services, as companies begin to learn how the spoken audio of their movies can help them reach new customers.

Very exciting stuff.  Stay tuned for more developments.  And you can check out GAudi and search for things the candidates have said here.

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