For businesses, there is another considerable benefit of spoken-word search for external facing content: As the use of spoken-word search increases, potential customers will be more likely to find podcasts and videocasts--which should decrease a business' dependence on sheer popularity or marketing efforts to draw users to a site.
An enterprise considering spoken-word search would not need to modify existing audio files. However, the technology isn't perfect. Audio content is more easily indexed if it has a clear, attentive speaker with little background noise and no background music. Higher-quality recordings and encodings produce better search results. TVEyes claims to have an average accuracy rate of 80 percent. Higher accuracy can be achieved through improvements in speech-recognition engines, but progress in that field takes years.
Development Status
TVEyes' Podscope is leading the pack in spoken-word search, but it does have rivals. Podzinger, powered by technology from BBN Technologies, offers spoken-word searching; that tool will display a small text transcript around the search terms. Unfortunately, this can also make obvious how inaccurate voice recognition is, since the transcribed text doesn't always match what's been said. Podscope does not perform any transcription services, either in full or snippets.
Audio/video search vendor Blinkx has inked a contract with Lycos to power searches on its broadband service. We're not aware of any other voice-recognition vendor or PBX manufacturer, such as those with speech-recognition IVRs, making headway into Internet search--and the big four search vendors have also lagged behind. Google, MSN and Yahoo do not offer spoken-word searching. Yahoo's audio search engine looks only for audio files based around keywords and typical Web searching, rather than performing spoken-word search. TVEyes partner AOL released a podcast search beta in July; the product is similar to Podscope but with a few user interface changes.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
