LAWTECH GURU BLOG by Jeff Beard

Ambrogi on Podcast Search Engines

Have you ever been lured in by a seemingly interesting podcast, only to learn that it was dryer than the Mohave Desert at high noon? If so, check out the Feb. 2006 issue of Law Technology News for Bob Ambrogi's take on the latest podcast search engines (free registration required). Some of these technologies are evolving more quickly than others, or at least in different directions. I remember when Podscope was getting all the ooh's and aah's. But our ever-surfing Bob has hit on Podzinger, which offers some value-added features such as speech recognition to transcribe the entire contents of podcasts. To hear Bob explain it:

"Podzinger is impressive for its features. Search results include text highlights of the portions of the audio that match your search. Click on any word in the highlighted text, and the podcast begins to play at the point where you clicked. To the left of the results is a control panel that lets you play the entire podcast or move backward or forward through the audio. The control panel also lets you download the entire podcast, subscribe to its RSS feed, or subscribe via iTunes or Yahoo!"

While nothing is perfect, these search tools just keep getting better in helping us improve our own podcast signal-to-noise ratio. Given the complexities of trying to recognize everyone's speech patterns, it's still pretty impressive.