Mountain View, California-based Internet titan Google has expanded an internally developed method that lets  users of its popular video sharing site YouTube search for words or phrases spoken within certain videos, with the Tuesday launch of Google Audio Indexing. The new feature was released as a part of Google's test bed for new technologies, Google Labs, and was limited to searching the spoken content portion of YouTube's various political channels, the search giant said. New Features However Still Limited To YouTube's Political Channels Google Audio Indexing, which the company also referred to as GAudi, is a more robust version of the free technology Google first tested in June on its iGoogle portal page for Google, where it was available as a tool called Google Election Video Search. Wednesday's release of a dedicated Web site has expanded that program with more options for finding words and phrases spoken within YouTube videos. By bringing the GAudi program to Google Labs the YouTube parent company expected users to be able to "enjoy this technology in a bigger way," according to Google Audio Indexing product manager Arnaud Sahuguet, who announced the program in a message posted Wednesday on the official Google blog. The choice of launching GAudi using political and presidential election video content, such as speeches and political advertisements, was made at least in part because the technology was, according to Google, "known to perform well" with such material, which generally contains easier-to-index speech than the average submissions to YouTube. "Google Audio Indexing searches only those videos uploaded on the YouTube political channels," Google said on the Web site for the new program. Find And Refine Searches For The Words Spoken In Online Video While the previous iGoogle Election Video Search tool was limited to the United States presidential election, Google said that it had wider ambitions for the GAudi program. "The aim of Google Audio Indexing on Google Labs is broader and the U.S. election is just a first step," Google said in the help section of the new program. Together Google described the two tools as "part of a broader effort  around politics, with initiatives such as CNN/YouTube debates, YouChoose, and Google Checkout for political contributions." Using GAudi allows YouTube searchers to see how many times a word or phrase is mentioned in the speech of videos, and displays yellow markers on a timeline that make it simple to see where the query terms are within the video, with a maximum of ten mentions shown. The yellow markers can be clicked to play each portion of a video where search terms occur, and searches can be done over all available videos in the supported political channels or, by using filters, within subgroups or even individual videos. Google said that GAudi uses "speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to the right portion of the video where these words are spoken." Google Audio Indexing Searches Speech Within YouTube Videos The GAudi system works by combining several Google techniques. "It uses speech technology to transform spoken words into text and leverages the Google indexing technology to return the best results to the user,"  Google noted, with matching videos selected based on a number of factors including "the spoken content, the metadata, [and] the freshness," according to the Web site for the new program. Future plans for the technology, which was developed by Google's own speech research group, were not disclosed at the time of Tuesday's release, however Google's Sahuguet said "we will continue to experiment with new features" for GAudi. The launch was seen as the latest among Google's efforts to increase the profitability of YouTube, which it purchased in 2006 in a stock deal worth $1.65 billion. In May Google said it planned to make increased profitability at YouTube, the world's most popular video sharing Web site, the top priority during the rest of 2008, which it aimed to bring about through new advertising techniques, according to Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. With its Audio Indexing program Google may be paving the way toward the future expansion of the technology to all YouTube video content. Related Links :
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12:27 am on Sep. 18, 2008 (utc 0)