Google Launched Elections Video Search Gadget To Translate Speech to Text

Google speech team (part of Google Research) is launching the Google Elections Video Search gadget today. With the help of Google’s own speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube's Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed.

Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find.

The gadget only searches videos uploaded to YouTube's Politicians channels, which include videos from Senator Obama's and Senator McCain's campaigns, as well as those from dozens of other candidates and politicians.

It usually takes less than a few hours for a video to appear in the index after it has been published on YouTube. Candidates can control the videos that appear in the gadget by managing the content they upload to YouTube. While some of the transcript snippets you see may not be 100% accurate, however you'll find this gadget useful for most purposes. Speech recognition is a difficult problem that hasn't yet been completely solved, but Google is constantly working to refine it’s algorithms and improve the accuracy and relevance of these transcribed results.