Speech Recognition in YouTube Lets You Search for Spoken Content

by:

Amit Agarwal

This is huge. Google has added speech recognition capability in some YouTube videos that enables you to search for text spoken in these videos.

youtube speech recognition

To try speech recognition in YouTube yourself, add this gadget to your Google homepage. The search is currently limited to some political videos only but a good hint of what is yet to come in Google search.

speech text

If your search query match some YouTube video, the positions are indicated by yellow markers - hover the mouse to read the transcribed text as in the screenshot.

Like Blinkx search, Google uses their own speech recognition technologies to listen to the audio portion of the video and then transcribe speech into text.

And this happens real fast - Google can search and transcribe text from new videos with hours after they get uploaded on YouTube.

Imagine how useful Google search will become when it expands their video speech recognition to other video content like TV clips, news videos, video podcasts, etc.

Speech Recognition in YouTube Lets You Search for Spoken Content - Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal