Video Search by Phonetics

One of the holy grails of technology is video search.  What if you could search a database of video for clips that say this or that.  Efforts have centered on voice to text technologies, but Nexidia is taking a different approach, something that they call Speech Intelligence.  Their technology listens for phonetics, the same thing that we listen for.

This Google video plays an interview with the company’s SVP for Marketing and Product Management, Anna Convery.

Think about the possibilities of teachers being able to create their own digital multimedia learning environments (textbooks), when they can search news and entertainment archives, and remix their findings into instructional media.

OK, admittedly, U.S. copyright law has a ways to go in order to adapt this this sort of remix classroom.  But do they have a choice?

Plesser, Andy. “Nexidia Is Pioneering Video Search Through Phonetics.” [Weblog AlwwaysOn] 27 Nov 2006. 13 Dec 2006 <http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/7510>.

3 thoughts on “Video Search by Phonetics”

  1. I was searching the other day for a pop culture reference to the saying “sticking it to the man.” Hoping for something witty, I searched all over for a Family Man quote, but I didn’t have any success.

    I ended up using the Sprint PCS commercial found on Google Video. But I would have liked to have more options and a searchable database would have made things easier.

    This was for a final project on white privilege in society asking what do we know about “the man” who does “the man” represent.

    I would bet that the ALA is researching ways to make this video database searchable and useable.

    ~Kyle~

  2. I find this a little troubling some respects. This is just another step in the polarizing of our world. No one will need to watch things that they disagree with. If we take this search technology to the next step, it could esentally find things that agree with our senablities and jump to those clips or skip ones we don’t like. We already have information that we agree with fed to us throught RSS. I don’t think we should stop working on projects like this, but we should address some of the issues before they become issues.

  3. Dave,

    I agree with you. This concerns me as well, and its one of the things that concerns me about blogs and RSS, that we can connect our selves to people and sources of information that agree with our word view, not coming into contact with counter opinions or facts.

    I think that learning to handle these dynamic and ego-centric information opportunities should be part of what we call literacy — the ethical use of information part of literacy.

    A while back I suggested four questions that we should get students in the habit of answering as they read (and write) blogs (and other sources of information). You can read about it at:

    Evaluating Blogs

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