Search for spoken words inside a YouTube video using Google Audio Indexing

Posted on November 10, 2008 at 5:23 am

Google’s plan to dominate the world by indexing all information has taken a big leap. Google recently has indexed political videos. With this database of indexed videos you can now search for specific parts of the video where your search words are mentioned.

It makes sense that Google started with political videos since they know that political videos receive a lot of attention. With more users testing the tool, Google can fast track the development of this engine. Google will look at how viewers use the tool so they can modify and add enhancements to it. Now it only indexed political videos from the USA but soon it will index others as well.

To use this searching capability go to this link under Google Labs: http://labs.google.com/gaudi

Google Audio Indexing, or GAUDI, is still on it’s early stage on Google Labs. It’s interface is like the common Google search page. The textbox where you can input your searched phrases is in the upper part of the page while the resulting video is in the center part of the page:

The yellow marks on the video timeline shows where the searched phrases appear. The texts on the lower part shows a play button where you can jump into that specific time of the video:

Another powerful feature of this tool is that you can search for mentions inside a single video. On the lower part of the video player there is a search box where you can type any words you want to search on the currently playing video:

With the snap shot transcripts of each mention you can easily identify the context of the searched phrase:

The capability to see the transcripts removes the need of jumping on the various parts of the video to look for the right segment. By knowing the context of the mentioned word you can jump into that segment at once. You can also see the transcripts if you hover your mouse pointer on the yellow markers: