podzinger

Last week’s Inside the Net podcast from Amber MacArthur was an interview with Alex Laats, president of Podzinger, a podcast search service.

Addressing the obvious problem of how to find specific content within podcasts or videoblogs, podzinger creates a text index of the audio data from the audio or video files using speech-to-text technology to enable search within a podcast.

When PODZINGER returns search results from its database of over 115,000 podcasts (you’ll need to use safari on a mac, IE otherwise) it provides snippets where it finds matches in the podcast. As it relies on voice recognition the transcript is not 100%, but it works extremely quickly considering the data involved. For audio and video playback you can click on any point in those snippets and the audio or video will begin to play from that point forward. For video, clicking anywhere on the screen image will pop-up a separate window to play that video. Well worth experimenting with this, and also worth subscribing to Inside the Net through iTunes for their 30 minute interviews.