Intra-file ‘Text Search’ on Yahoo! Podcast!?!
Well, i dont have to be in the Bay area to listen to what happens at the BayCHI monthly program meetings! Thanks to Yahoo
Podcasts</a>’. (BayCHI : the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of ACM SIGCHI)
Some of the Podcast audio files span more than 2 hours. Now, as a User, i would like to Cut to the Chase, (what a clichéd phrase) and be spared of the gory details.
I don’t have the time to listen to a 2 hour long Podcast. Instead, let me choose portions of the Podcast which I might be interested in, to hear. I can drag the pointer on the timeline to navigate back and forth. But the success rate of finding what I specifically want to hear is based on trial and error
Yahoo’s Podcasts Search can use a “Contexual Text
Search within the Podcast file content”
- Use some kind of a Speech to Text converter application to produce a text version of the Podcast.
- Write some kind of a rule/algorithm to map ‘keywords’ to the timeline.
- User does a ‘text search’ for a keyword
- The search result will highlight the keyword and show couple of related sentences. The keyword will be linked to a specific point in the timeline
- User can either read the text version
OR - Choose to listen to the speech exactly when the keyword gets voiced out by clicking on the keyword. Alternatively, the timeline can have flags indicating the location of the keyword.
- User can also start hearing the podcast from a specific flagged location on the timeline.
I haven’t yet completely flushed this thing out and still am looking for failure modes of this idea.
Yahoo’s Audio Search feature needs to be contextually introduced in Yahoo Podcast file content search.
IT Conversations already has the feature you describe, through Podscope.
http://www.itconversations.com/
http://www.podscope.com/blog/?page_id=4faq
I think it’s a GREAT feature. I’ll look into whether and how we might get the BayCHI podcast indexed by Podscope.